Little brothers
By: Jason Hurley
 

Introduction

The transition from feudalism and monarchies to the bureaucratic state and advancements in administrative science has increased governments' vigilance, reach, and power over its citizens by creating systems designed to locate, track, and identify individuals. A single computer with a searchable database can now act as its own bureaucracy operated not by people in large organizations skilled in administrative science, but by quick algorithms created by computer science.

The paper will explore, within the United States, methods, motives, privacy concerns, and legal issues of the use of information collected by non-government entities for government purposes.

Drafting ice cream

For years Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor Restaurant, a chain of ice cream shops, gave customers free ice cream sundaes on their birthday if they filled out a form with their birthday and other personal information.

Farrell's sold the information collected to a list broker. Farrell's believed, as they told their customers, that the information would be sold to "firms selling encyclopedias or magazines oriented toward children" (United Press International, 1984).

The list broker sold the information not only to companies, but also sold the list of 167,000 names to the Selective Service for $5,687.

In October of 1983, the Selective Service "began using the list to mail 1,500 to 3,500 warning cards a month to young men whose listed birthdays indicated they were about to turn 18" (Burnham, 1984).

One such warning addressed to "Johnny Klomber," a fictional 17 year old created by Eric Hentzell, then age 10, caused widespread publicity of the use of the birthday list by the Selective Service when Hentzell's father received the letter and "was disturbed that Uncle Sam could be using ice cream parlor mailing lists to keep track of youngsters at an 'innocent age.'" (United Press International, 1984).

When informed of the birthday list and Selective Service connection, the executive vice president of Farrell's expressed that he "did not feel the benefits of such Government tracking programs were worth the sacrifices" (Burnham, 1984). A spokesman for the Selective Service stated "[t]he use of this commercial list was entirely appropriate and we don't have any moral qualms," but because Farrell's arrangement with the list broken included approval of entities to which the list would be sold and permission was not given to sell the list to the Selective Service, the Selective Service decided to delete and stop using the list.

The results of this case demand that the government evaluate the ramifications of false positives both for the government and individuals. A company can sell the same information to advertisers (and spammers) just as it would to the government. So to maintain the right to be left alone, it is sometimes necessary to submit inaccurate information to entities that exist not to govern or protect, but to make monetary profits. But now it seems that entering a fake name or other false information on some website's registration form could earn the privacy conscious citizen an alias list or even visit by the FBI.

Libraries

In a paper presented at the 12th conference for Computer, Freedom, and Privacy, Carrie Gardner, Ph.D. described a blind hunt for information by law enforcement using library records. In 1990 an infant was abandoned in Decatur, Texas and without any leads, the District Attorney's office delivered a subpoena to local libraries requesting "the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of everyone who checked out any book on childbirth during the previous nine months." The library challenged the subpoena and a District Court Judge ruled in their favor. The authorities had no indication that the mother read such a book, but if "the library turned over the circulation records, every patron who had checked out a resource about childbirth would have been interviewed and investigated" as a suspect in the case (Gardner, 2002).

In 1970, the U.S. Treasury Department, in search of individuals planning bomb attacks, requested the Milwaukee Public Library and twenty-seven libraries and branches in Atlanta to hand over "circulation records of books and materials on explosives." Incidents like these and others compelled the American Library Association to issue a statement that they believe "the efforts of the federal government to convert library circulation records into 'suspect lists' constituted an unconscionable and unconstitutional invasion of the right of privacy of library patrons and, if permitted to continue, will do irreparable damage to the educational and social value of the libraries of this country" (Intellectual Freedom Manual, 1996, p 155).

Shortly after September 11, 2001, in Broward County of Florida, authorities, with court orders, "collected computer information from public libraries where someone fitting the description of Mohamed Atta, the man emerging as a leader of the terrorist group, was seen using computers with Internet access" (Holland, 2001). Investigators also requested and obtained "records from two library branches in Hollywood . . . to piece together the reading habits and Internet activities of those suspected in" the September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States (Holland, 2001).

Sources of information

The FBI and other agencies have collected information from an assortment of private industries including:
  • Grocery store frequent-shopper records
  • Scuba diving certification records
  • Store purchases, both online and offline
  • Club memberships
  • Utility bills
  • "Easy Pass" toll records and building access cards
  • Real estate and mortgage information
  • Magazine subscriptions
(Center for Democracy, 2003).

Methods of recruitment

A report by the American Civil Liberties Union describes a scheme dubbed "Operation Shamrock" started in 1945 in which U.S. telegraph companies delivered "copies of all messages sent to or from the United States" to the National Security Agency (2004, p 9). The NSA recruited the companies by appealing to the patriotism of the company presidents.

After September 11, 2001 many airlines voluntarily turnd over customer travel records to law enforcement. The ACLU claims that "the information was turned over not to help the government solve a particular crime or track a particular suspect, but in order to examine each traveler's records in the hopes of identifying terrorists by detecting 'suspicious' patterns" (2004, p 10).

The paper also highlights a secretive program called InfraGrad that it states is analogous to a corporate TIPS program. "The Cleveland Plain Dealer describes it as 'a vast informal network of powerful friends,' a 'giant group of tipsters' created by the FBI under a 'philosophy of quietly working with corporate America' in order to 'funnel security alerts away from the public eye and receive tips on possible illegal activity'" (2004, p 10).

Constraints on the government

According to a report by the Center for Democracy, "the United States has no comprehensive privacy law for commercial data, a great deal of information is available to law enforcement and intelligence agencies for purchase from data aggregators" (2003). The Privacy Act of 1974 forbids law enforcement from collecting and maintaining information about people who are not suspected in a crime. However, "government is increasing circumventing those restrictions simply by turning to private companies, which are not subject to the law, and buying or compelling the transfer of private data that it could not collect itself" (American Civil Liberties Union, 2004, p 8).

"The government has argued that it should have the same access to consumer data that the private sector has" but access is not the only argument necessary justifying obtaining sensitive information (American Civil Liberties Union, 2004, p 8). Need to know and reasons for use differ between the holders of customer data in the private sector and the government seeking that data.

According to the Center for Democracy, "under existing law the government can ask for, purchase or demand access to most private sector data. Constraints on how the government can use the data once accessed are uncertain." (2003).

Problems with information providers

Companies such as ChoicePoint that aggregate and then "sell info to the government agencies aren't liable for its accuracy, nor are guidelines in place about how it's used" (Black, 2002). ChoicePoint is an information broker that uses publicly available information to provide businesses and government investigating a person a compiled list describing a person's credit, criminal and job history, associations, and other information. The US government uses ChoicePoint as a way of outsourcing information compilation tasks. ChoicePoint "sells personal information to federal law-enforcement agencies, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the U.S. Marshals Service, and 7,500 local police departments across the country" (Black, 2002).

Regulations of information held by private companies do not require that the company provide people with the ability to correct information about themselves that is erroneous. When Richard Smith, chief technology officer of the Privacy Foundation, purchased records from ChoicePoint on his family, he received a sixty page report that stated many erroneous facts including that he was possibly "a company officer for more than 30 small businesses around the country," that his wife had had a son unknown to him named Kyle, his daughter was actually his neighbor, he had previously married a woman named Mary, and that he died in 1976. (Black, 2002).

In 1998, a "woman was fired from a technical job after ChoicePoint told her employer that she was a shoplifter and convicted drug dealer," but the woman had no criminal record (Smith 2001).

"In the last presidential election . . . thousands of African Americans were misidentified as felons and denied the right to vote" (Smith 2001).

ChoicePoint argues that the services they provide help make "for a safer society." (Smith 2001).

Representative Adam Putnam, Chair of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Technology, Information Policy, and the Census believes:
  1. Congress should begin oversight hearings on the information brokers' practices.

  2. Agencies should be asked to routinely report on the private-sector databases that they have purchased, including the number of records obtained, and the specific characteristics of the data.

  3. Congress should determine whether Privacy Act obligations should be applied to the entire information broker industry, as these businesses are now engaged in the practice of building government profiles of individuals that would be regulated under the Privacy Act. (2003).

Effect on companies

Companies that maintain large amounts of personally identifiable customer data may be hurt financially by government requests. "Last year, BellSouth received more than 32,000 subpoenas for customer information, about half of those from law enforcement. In addition, the telecommunications giant received 636 court orders, mostly from the government, including requests for wiretaps" (Moscoco, 2003). For each request, employees must spend time to find, process, and deliver the requested information.

When the FBI asked several scuba shops for customer information just before Memorial Day weekend, the "Professional Association of Diving Instructors decided to voluntarily hand the information to the FBI rather than burden their members before a peak weekend." "The group sent the FBI a ZIP drive with the names, addresses and other personal information of about 2 million people -- nearly every U.S. citizen who had learned to dive in the previous three years" (Moscoco, 2003).

More than 50 different companies are now selling information systems to help companies become "Patriot-compliant." Tools that "filter every record and transaction by a customer into one place, making it easier to find patterns and answer any subpoenas about that person" now have a demand as holders of private data must respond to increasing government requests for information on their customers.

In December 2002, when Western Union did not report several suspicious transactions, they were fined $8 million (Moscoco, 2003).

Bibliography and further readings

Copyright 1984 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
August 4, 1984, Saturday, Late City Final Edition
SECTION: Section 1; Page 5, Column 1; National Desk
LENGTH: 436 words
HEADLINE: SELECTIVE SERVICE TO STOP USE OF BIRTHDAY LIST
BYLINE: By DAVID BURNHAM
DATELINE: WASHINGTON, Aug. 3


Copyright 1984 U.P.I.
United Press International
August 3, 1984, Friday, AM cycle
SECTION: Domestic News
LENGTH: 300 words
HEADLINE: Draft board gives up mailing list
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO

Fact or Fiction: Privacy in American Libraries,
presented at CFP 2002, the 12th Conference on Computers Freedom & Privacy by Carrie Gardner, Ph.D.
Carrie Gardner Ph.D.
Coordinator, Library Media Services, Milton Hershey School
Past Chair, American Library Association Intellectual Freedom Committee, Privacy Sub-Committee
http://www.cfp2002.org/proceedings/proceedings/gardner.pdf

Title: Intellectual freedom manual [electronic resource] / compiled by the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association.
Edition: 5th ed.
Publisher: Chicago : American Library Association, 1996.
Description: xlvii, 393 p. : ill. ; 23 cm.
Subject(s): Libraries Censorship United States Handbooks, manuals, etc.
Freedom of information United States Handbooks, manuals, etc.
Electronic books.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 369-370) and index.
Electronic reproduction. Boulder, Colo. : NetLibrary, 2001. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to NetLibrary affiliated libraries.
Other Contributors: NetLibrary, Inc.
American Library Association. Office for Intellectual Freedom.

URL: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~volstok/docs/thread.shtml
Author: Jason Hurley
Date of access: 01/09/2005

Center for Democracy & Technology
Privacy’s Gap: The Largely Non-Existent Legal Framework for Government Mining of Commercial Data
May 28, 2003
www.cdt.org/security/usapatriot/030528cdt.pdf

BusinessWeek online
January 24, 2002
Privacy Matters
By Jane Black
Headline: Data Collectors Need Surveillance, Too
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/jan2002/nf20020124_0582.htm

Wired
May 11, 2001
What They (Don’t) Know About You
http://www.wired.com/news/privacy/0,1848,43743,00.html

Federal Computer Week
The state of surveillance
William Matthews
June 18, 2001
http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2001/0618/cov-main-06-18-01.asp

Robert Dreyfuss
July/August 2003 issue
MotherJones.com
Title: The Watchful & the Wary
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2003/07/ma_445_01.html

Feds demanding more info about companies' customers
Firms add staff, spend more to keep up with requests
Eunice Moscoco
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
8/17/2003

CAPPS II Fact Sheet
U. S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
Transportation Security Administration
September 29, 2003
TSA Public Affairs: (571) 227-2829
http://www.tsa.dot.gov/public/display?theme=44&content=713

Markle Foundation
http://www.markletaskforce.org/guidelines/government_matrix.shtml
http://www.markletaskforce.org/guidelines/commercial_matrix.shtml


Database Nation
The upside of "zero privacy"
Declan McCullagh
http://reason.com/june-2004/mccullagh.pdf
June 2004
Reason


March 25, 2003
Representative Adam Putnam
Chair, House Government Reform Subcommittee
on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental
Relations, and the Census
B-349-A RHOB
Washington, DC 20515
Representative William Clay
Ranking Member, House Government Reform Subcommittee
on Technology, Information Policy, Intergovernmental
Relations, and the Census
B-349-A RHOB
Washington, DC 20515
Re: Hearing on Data Mining: Current Applications and Future Possibilities
http://www.epic.org/privacy/profiling/datamining3.25.03.html

Surveillance-Industrial Complex
American Civil Liberties Union
August 2004
http://www.aclu.org/Files/getFile.cfm?id=16225

Newly found stuff

Privacy the Safeway

Arson investigators in Washington found a fire starter with a Safeway wrapper on it at the scene of a house fire. A Washington fireman was charged with arson for setting the house on fire. When asked if he had purchased fire starter, he said he made no such purchase. However, Safeway handed the purchase records made with the firefighter's Safeway Club card which indicated that fire starter had been purchased with his card.

In January of 2005 all charges against the firefighter were dropped when another person admitted to the crime.

Sources
 http://heraldnet.com/stories/05/01/28/100loc_arson001.cfm
Jim Haley
Herald
Accessed: January 29, 2005

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002055245_arson06m.html
Seattle Times
Article date: October 7, 2004
Accessed: January 29, 2005

ChoicePoint and fraud

ChoicePoint divulged the personal records contain names, addresses, Social Security numbers, credit reports, and other highly personal information of more than 30,000 US citizens to fake companies. According to ChoicePoint's website, the company "helps reduce fraud and mitigate risk." Under their vision statement, ChoicePoint "strive[s] to create a safer and more secure society through the responsible use of information."

Source:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6969799/




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