Heck, who cares whether the NSA has been tracking our calls or Treasury has been rooting through our financial transactions. It’s all available out there already.
Almost every piece of personal information that Americans try to keep secret — including bank account statements, e-mail messages and telephone records — is semi-public and available for sale.
[…] “We had the impression that there were no secrets any more. Now we know that for sure,” said Rep. Ed Whitfield, a Kentucky Republican and chairman of the panel’s oversight subcommittee. He described a multimillion dollar industry that sells cell phone records for $200, Social Security information for $60 and a student’s university class schedule for $80.
Most often, the customers are banks or financial institutions attempting to locate absconding debtors. But law enforcement officers — including those in the Department of Homeland Security, FBI and Austin Police Department — have used the services on occasion.
And, of course, black hats — stalkers looking for their victims, drug dealers trying to track informants, etc. — have access to the data, too, which is usually obtained under false pretenses.
The committee subpoenaed representatives from 11 companies that use the Internet and phone calls to obtain, market, and sell personal data, but they refused to talk. All invoked their constitutional right to not incriminate themselves when asked whether they sold “personal, non-public information” that had been obtained by lying or impersonating someone.
I hate to ding anyone for invoking the 5th Amendment, but it does sound like there’s something there to investigate.
The committee focused on the technique of pretexting, in which a caller contacts a phone company, utility or government agency under the pretense of being someone else, perhaps the manager of a branch office or the actual customer.
Some lawmakers shook their heads as former data broker James Rapp explained how easily and quickly he could obtain and sell a bank password or credit card record of committee members. Rapp said by offering a few pieces of personal information, such as a person’s name and address, pretexters con a customer service representative into revealing other information. After a few inquiries, they can get the Social Security number, the key to a trove of other sensitive data.
The irony here is that we’ve all grown up on TV detective shows where these techniques were used all the time by Our Hero, dialing up the DMV and getting hold of their friend there, or contacting a bank and pretending to be someone they weren’t, or going to someone they know who could get that kind of info.
But, of course, those were the good guys. Who could criticize Magnum or Face or Rockford for using their wiles to Fight Crime?
A bit different when it’s a fraud looking up your records. Or the cops doing so.
Interestingly, one of the reasons for the hearings was to delve into why a couple of bills on such data brokers have been quietly quashed by House leadership — the rumor being that it could blow back on all the government “anti-terrorist” surveillance I referenced up in the first paragraph. Well, as long as I’m being kept safe from terrorists, I guess I won’t have any cause for complaint.
Right?
(via Bruce Schneier)