Feds Warrantlessly Tracking Americans’ Credit Cards in Real Time

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/realtime/

by marilyn • 16 years ago

89 44 16 years ago

shareme• 16 years ago

It seems like we are waking up to a bad dream that the US government is increasing the Skynet in the Terminator movies..

They track you, bug you, infiltrate , and than order drones to bomb the heck out of you..

The sad thing is its not the Government's fault. We as voters let this happen in not opposing the interests of the Military-Industrial-Financial complex with real votes on the issues..

dantheman2• 16 years ago

It's not the voters fault; it's a systemic fault. Once you accept that violence can be used to force people to take certain actions; and that its proper place is not only as last resort for self defense you accept a system that will continually gain more power and use force more and more. People need to realize that the use of force, and living at the expense of another is not sustainable and will eventually collapse.

narrator• 16 years ago

This was all laid out in Zbigniew Brzezinski's book "The Technetronic Era" back in the early 70s. They've been hard at work on all of this ever since. It's part of a clear detailed long-term vision and they've just been putting the finishing touches on it and everyone acts like it just happened all by itself.

http://www.amazon.com/Between-Two-Ages-Americas-Technetronic...

>"The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities." (This was an excellent prediction although it is slightly worse now.)

>'In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities effectively exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason." (Fox CNN and facebook?)

>"Today we are again witnessing the emergence of transnational elites ... [Whose] ties cut across national boundaries ...It is likely that before long the social elites of most of the more advanced countries will be highly internationalist or globalist in spirit and outlook ... The nation-state is gradually yielding its sovereignty... Further progress will require greater American sacrifices. More intensive efforts to shape a new world monetary structure will have to be undertaken, with some consequent risk to the present relatively favorable American position."

Qz2• 16 years ago

Don't be naive, 'the use of force' has been the only thing keeping governments in power since civilization began.

lionhearted4• 16 years ago

> We as voters let this happen in not opposing the interests of the Military-Industrial-Financial complex with real votes on the issues..

It's not that simple - one thing people to fail to realize is that when you authorize extraordinary powers for your own favorite causes, they'll inevitably be used for other worse causes as well.

It's not military/industrial/financial - even things as simple as letting the government take a driver's license for not paying child support means that there's now a precedent for denying someone's right to mobility for punitive reasons unrelated to actually operating a car. People support this when it's to get those no-good child support dodgers, but then they're shocked when this is broadly expanded to other civil offenses where they wouldn't support it.

People are naive. They think, "Oh, the Democrats will reverse the Republican's terrible policies when they get in." No they won't. They'll co-opt the power for their causes, and vice-versa. It's not clear which party is responsible for starting the reckless deficit spending, but now they both do it. They both give employment and money to sectors that support them. (Republicans in military, Democrats in social causes)

But don't be fooled for a minute that the excessive powers the Republicans authorize for the first time won't be taken up by the Democrats. And the excessive powers the Democrats take up will be used by Republicans.

It's not any one sector. Excessive government powers anywhere leads to excessive government power everywhere.

(And note - the Democrats are the banner-leaders in censoring and spying on the internet - I don't think that's because the Democrats are worse, but rather because I don't think the Republicans understand the internet. So it's not exactly military/financial/industrial that's doing this one)

jbooth• 16 years ago

Oh, geez. Give me a break. One party is responsible for deficit spending, it's the party that supported Reagan and Bush. Look at a chart. (in between, Clinton balanced the budget by cutting the military and raising taxes)

And ditto for military/industrial/financial. Every time those industries come up, conservatives are all rah rah go america and the liberals are derided as hippies.

If you feel a certain way, fine, I'm not even motivated to argue, really. Just don't give us the false equivalency stuff.. there's a pretty recent and pretty obvious historical record here.

mcantelon• 16 years ago

No matter who you vote for, the lobbyists and military/intel institutions run things from behind the scenes. Until the public at large realizes this, they'll retain false hopes.

stretchwithme4• 16 years ago

I'm not sure the voters can make a better choice.

In our winner-take-all electoral system, the voters are only given two viable choices, neither of which represents their own views. So our leaders are basically determined by who spends the most money in DC, with two options so life is simple for lobbyists and each party has competition. The system, quite accidentally, is designed for those who milk government, not those who pay the bills.

This system can be replaced, but given our Constitution, change is unlikely to happen to begin in DC. I think some sort of competing decision making system that is more trusted and uses proportional representation will have to be implemented that can then press for change.

Such a system would have no legal authority, but if highly trusted and transparent, it could have the moral authority to demand changes to the real electoral system. Especially if most people see the system consistently produce better decisions than Congress. That part's easy.

The trick is getting people to use such a system. Perhaps starting on the local or state level.

Any ideas?

anigbrowl5• 16 years ago

Well, consider the '3 strikes' law in California - commit three felony offenses, go to jail for life. Several other states have similar laws (Texas was the first in 1974) but California's was enacted via a ballot initiative, so the voters had a direct say on the matter.

It passed with a good majority: lots of politicians thought it would be a good idea, the police and prison officers unions supported it (surprise - more work for them, and they are very powerful lobbying groups in CA politics), and it seems like a nice neat solution to a complicated problem...but in practice it doesn't work very well. Now our prisons are so overcrowded that we have to ship people out of state and the conditions have been ruled unconstitutional, plus keeping all these people imprisoned costs us a fortune and our courts are so backlogged that people sometimes go free because we can't get them into court within the time required for a 'speedy trial'. Nor has the three strikes law had much effect on crime or recidivism that we can tell.

Voters have watered it down a little bit, allowing some people to go into drug treatment programs if their crimes are not violent. In the recent election, the Republican candidate for Attorney General ran on a platform of repealing the law, because it just doesn't work very well. He lost.

So it's not just congress or state representatives. This kind of thing will always be a problem. I was going to say '...until people are more aware civics and the law,' but somehow I don't think that's going to change much. We could spend more money on education and suchlike but most people vote with their hearts instead of their heads.

jdp232• 16 years ago

"For credit cards, agents can get real-time information on a person’s purchases by writing their own subpoena, followed up by a order from a judge that the surveillance not be disclosed."

The information was in a Power Point presentation Chris Soghoian FOIA'ed. Good reporting once again by Ryan Singel.

joebananas• 16 years ago

Makes you wonder how long before Joe Lieberman condemns the FOI act as treasonous.

jrockway3• 16 years ago

He already did, it's just that nobody is allowed to talk about it.

jrockway3• 16 years ago

Having worked for a bank, I'm shocked that they managed to build a product that offers no business value but requires actual technical expertise to implement.

Now that I think about it... it's probably an Excel spreadsheet...

bediger• 16 years ago

I upgraded a Visa Level 1 merchant's credit card system a few years ago. It was an unholy mess of C++ servers, Java servers, large amounts of semi-comprehensible PL/SQL, and Korn shell scripts. Real time authorization was handled by one system, and end-of-day settlement was handled by a very different system, under a different director.

I wouldn't be at all surprised that the "real time" data the feds get is very nearly worthless. It's probably patchy and intermittent, and varies greatly in timeliness. The document says that "open ended" systems (Visa and MasterCard) depend on issuing banks, which is certainly true, but the merchants can also contribute greatly to delays in getting data in. The Level 1 merchant did something called "Assumed Approval" when it lost contact with the payment provider. Since about 96% of all authorization requests got approved, it would just assume that all auth requests got approvals when network problems prevented actually getting approvals. The feds wouldn't find out about those transactions until end-of-day settlement.

grandalf2• 16 years ago

It would seem that this makes it significantly easier to stay under the radar -- simply set up your credit cards to suggest a very normal life and then use cash for any illicit activities.

And, if a group of people (such as a terrorist cell) wanted to, it would be easy to deliberately create a paper trail to mislead authorities.

jrockway3• 16 years ago

You get promoted based on how many cases you solve, not how many difficult cases you solve. If you are smarter than the average criminal, you probably stand a less-than-average chance of being caught.

sielskr• 16 years ago

because the authorities have no control over the supply of cash, would never try to outlaw cash, or never require banks to report the withdrawal or deposit of cash.

grandalf2• 16 years ago

At the levels necessary to do terrorist acts, cash is essentially unmonitored.

sleight422• 16 years ago

The most painful part of this article to me is this one quote:

"The Justice Department did not return a call for comment."

Our own government is, once again, not holding itself accountable to the people or the fourth estate. Is it any wonder then that organizations like WikiLeaks exist that perform the function that the fourth estate is failing in?

(EDIT: Yes, I realize that WikiLeaks mission is somewhat different from the fourth estate but even so.)

anigbrowl5• 16 years ago

[0] He heard about this in 2005 (when the government was run by a different administration) but couldn't find anything. Eventually he filed a FOIA request. Silence, until spring of last year, when he was told there was some some information but it was redacted. So he filed an appeal, and it was granted. I suspect the lack of DoJ comment is because they're still trying to find out whether it was a fully formed program or just junior official's bid for career visibility - I suspect the latter, given the extremely basic level of information on these slides and lack of other documentation.

It's unclear whether the question left with the DoJ was about this 'hotwatch' project or about administrative subpoenas in general. An AS is a request for infor information issued by a government agency under statutory authority (ie Congress passed a law specifically saying an agency may issue one in an investigation and it must be complied with). About 300 government agencies are empowered to issue them altogether, although usually within a narrowly defined scope. The obvious constitutional problems with administrative subpoenas have been known for some time [1]. Misuse of such procedures has resulted in disciplinary proceedings at the FBI, among other agencies [2].

The basic thing to remember is that legally speaking warrants are not required for this kind of information gathering because it does not constitute a search [3] - as a legal term, this may not always mean what you think it means. for example, your phone conversations are generally private and require a warrant to listen to, but the numbers you call are not, and subpoena-ing that information from your phone service provider is not a search - at least, so said the Supreme Court in 1979 and neither it nor Congress have seen fit to decide otherwise since then [4]. This manner of gathering information is not actually new at all, as subpoena powers go back a lot farther than 1979 - that's just the last time their legality was debated in this context.

Some people think the options available to law enforcement should be much stronger, of course [5]. But in the meantime, relax - the sky is not in fact falling and things have not taken a sudden drastic turn for the worse.

0. http://paranoia.dubfire.net/2010/12/dojs-hotwatch-real-time-... 1. http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/RS22407.pdf 2. http://www.justice.gov/oig/testimony/t1004.pdf 3. http://cyb3rcrim3.blogspot.com/2010/05/administrative-subpoe... 4. http://cyb3rcrim3.blogspot.com/2007/09/fourth-amendment-priv... 5. http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:0Eiic5n5QFcJ:w... < sorry, original is 404ed

sleight422• 16 years ago

However, per [3], a subpoena is required which, unless I'm mistaken, does require a judge (and therefore due process).

Also, it would at least be a common courtesy for the government to acknowledge receipt of the request and that they intend to follow through. Instead, the DoJ did not respond, per Wired.

While I do greatly appreciate the detailed insight, I stand by my original point.

dangrover2• 16 years ago

Hmm, makes me want to use cash for everything, but then I'd have to pay an assload in ATM fees.

burgerbrain2• 16 years ago

If you just get cash in moderately sized portions, its really not that bad. A $2 charge for a $200 withdrawl is chump change.

sp332• 16 years ago

That's like an extra 1% tax on all my purchases, just for privacy. And it goes out the window if I use a "loyalty card" or email coupon.

SageRaven• 16 years ago

You know, you can walk into a bank and withdraw a wad of cash without a fee.

I went for a couple of years at an employer, walking my paycheck to the credit union each payday and simply cashing it. I'd deposit enough for writing checks for bills, but I otherwise started every other week with $2k in my pocket. Then they mandated direct-deposit, so I got lazy and my large cash withdraws became less and less frequent.

orangecat• 16 years ago

Or pick a bank with conveniently located ATMs. I don't understand how ATM fees are an issue at all; I use cash way more than the average person and have never paid any.

Natsu• 16 years ago

Funny, I already use cash for almost everything.

But I did it because I didn't want the credit card companies to have every detail about my life.

ck2• 16 years ago

What really upsets me about ALL these things is that it seems highly unlikely any of these privacy violations would have caught any known terrorists, foreign or domestic.

It's just lazy law enforcement covering itself so it has an after-the-fact method to hunt people down easily, just like all the security cameras in the UK are not to actively prevent crime, but just to have a trail afterwards.

Feds Warrantlessly Tracking Americans’ Credit Cards in Real Time

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