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Peace at any cost is a Prelude to War!
Who's tracking you?
Government, businesses, just about everyone
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Editor's note: This is the second of a three-part serialization of Michael S.
Hyatt's blockbuster new exposé, "Invasion of Privacy: How to Protect Yourself
in the Digital Age." Look for part 3 tomorrow.
© 2001 Regnery Publishing
You are being tracked by just about anyone who thinks he can sell to you,
steal from you or control you. This includes government agencies and big
businesses; banks, credit reporting agencies and other financial information
resellers; insurance companies, pharmacies and other health-related
organizations; political and extremist groups; local retail outlets and
marketers; employers and fellow employees; spouses, ex-spouses and potential
spouses; lawyers and private investigators; and even common criminals,
hackers and practical jokers.
This is not merely an Internet problem. It is true that technological
progress in data storage and data transfer has made it possible for others to
monitor you more easily and to gather your personal information more
speedily. It is also true that communication over the Internet has brought
about new ways in which you can be scrutinized. These problems are real.
Nevertheless, the issue is not the Internet per se. Even if you don't use a
computer, your activity is still being tracked, and your identity is
vulnerable to those who wish to learn about you for whatever reason. In 1989,
long before the Internet was a reality, a stalker was able to find and kill
"My Sister Sam" sitcom star Rebecca Schaeffer by using motor-vehicle
registration records in California.
Advances in technology are only making the problem worse. We are being
tracked with increasing efficiency. We are being tracked more affordably. And
we are being tracked more uniformly as various institutions share information
with one another.
Many different groups offer rationales for why we need to expect all our
personal information to be available to whoever wants it. The two main
legitimate proponents of the panopticon are business interests and various
government agencies. But professional criminals also benefit from this
situation.
Here's an overview:
Within the law: The corporate perspective
Businesses obviously want to gain new customers and keep the customers they
have. To do this, they need information. It is the fuel that drives modern
industry. The more information a business has about a prospect or a customer,
the more likely it can meet that customer's needs or shape its promotions to
appeal to those needs.
The information about a customer is called a "profile." It contains both
demographic and psychographic data – not only who the person is but also what
he does and why he does it. As a business collects more and more data about
its customers, it soon discovers that such data are an asset that can be sold
on the open market. Businesses now routinely sell customer profiles to anyone
who will pay for them. This has become a big problem in some industries, such
as financial services. As a result of deregulation, one company can offer a
full range of financial services: banking, insurance, investment brokerage
and direct marketing. Thus, the lure of "one-stop shopping" allows a single
company to know a customer 's entire financial situation.
This information can be, and sometimes is, used to exploit the customer. For
example, U.S. Bancorp in Minnesota sold the personal account information of
its customers to a telemarketing company for over $4 million plus a 22
percent commission on whatever sales were generated from the database. As the
Minnesota attorney general's office reported:
"[U.S.Bancorp] provided MemberWorks Inc. with the following information for
its customers: name, address, telephone numbers of the primary and secondary
customer, gender, marital status, homeownership status, occupation, checking
account number, credit card number, Social Security number, birth date,
account open date, average account balance, account frequency information,
credit limit, credit insurance status, year-to-date finance charges,
automated transactions authorized, credit card type and brand, number of
credit cards, cash advance amount, behavior score, bankruptcy score, date of
last payment, amount of last payment, date of last statement, and statement
balance."
Above the law: The government's perspective
In our society, government is responsible for punishing criminals, protecting
citizens and preventing crimes – and for any number of other services. The
government has used this as a rationale for all sorts of information
gathering and surveillance. We are constantly being tracked by Big Brother
through a variety of means – birth certificates, tax forms, motor vehicle
registration, marriage certificates, voter registration, property records,
court records, arrest records, divorce records, death certificates and on and
on.
Even where the government is entrusted to protect privacy, it does not
reliably do so. Laws protecting privacy are helpful only if they are obeyed
and enforced. For instance, an Ohio public school sold information to a bank
about some of its students, enabling the bank to solicit business from the
parents – despite the fact that it is illegal for public schools to provide
such information to anyone without the parents' consent.
Casual record keeping and failure to comply with the law are just part of the
problem. Various government projects systematically invade our privacy. The
National Security Agency (NSA), for example, has developed Echelon, a
comprehensive spy network that monitors communication around the world. The
Treasury Department has formed FinCEN, a network for retrieving personal
financial information in real time. The FBI is now deploying Carnivore, a
program that intercepts and reads e-mail on a mass scale.
Of course, many would not argue with the government's desire to protect us by
stopping violent crime before it happens or to prevent money laundering, drug
trafficking, tax evasion and so on. But what happens when government agencies
invade our individual rights? We are losing our privacy to the government,
and in the process, we are falling under its control.
More and more we find that we must simply depend on unaccountable government
agencies not to violate our rights.
Outside the law: The criminal perspective
The government and even some private industries consider access to our
personal information an important way to prevent, detect and solve crimes.
But even if that were true, a concern is that the information superhighway is
not restricted to authorized drivers. Criminals can, and do, use the
panopticon to gain the information and control necessary to exploit others.
In other words, the very means that the government and businesses employ for
security purposes can actually lead to crime.
Perhaps the most egregious example of this sort of "safety equals
vulnerability" equation is the ubiquitous Social Security number and its use
in stalking and identity theft. As we saw with Amy Boyer, the Social Security
number is a magic key that gives stalkers access to almost any other
information they wish to have. (The other key is the target's name plus date
of birth.) The Social Security number – which predators can get through
theft, fraud or hacking – also allows identity thieves to impersonate their
victims, putting them into debt and committing other crimes under their
names. The information superhighway, so efficient at spreading information,
ruins the reputation of victims of identity theft; reports are spread to
credit and law enforcement agencies of debts the victims never incurred and
crimes they never committed.
Victims report that both police and credit officials often treat them as
perpetrators. One victim wrote: "I sent them a signed statement. Then they
wanted a notarized statement so I sent them that. Then they wanted copies of
my driver's license and my passport or Social Security card. After I would
send each item, they would demand more and more. I didn't want them to have
copies of my driver's license or passport. I felt they were careless in
letting anyone open an account in my name, and I didn't feel safe giving my
personal information to them. It took three years before they finally removed
the negative rating they had placed on my credit. I couldn't buy a car or get
a student loan, and I was in school. I was considered guilty until proven
innocent. Finally they removed it, but only because I called them for the
thousandth time and lost it over the phone."
When 19-year-old Sarah learned that she was being accused of trying to cash
stolen checks, she did not understand how it could have happened. Her purse
had been stolen 10 days earlier, but everything had been returned to her.
Later, it occurred to her family that their car had been stolen the previous
year, and Sarah's license had been inside the car. However it had happened,
Sarah's identity had been stolen. Using false identification based on Sarah's
Social Security number and possibly other information from stolen credit
cards or checks, someone was now able to pass herself off as Sarah and use
her identity to commit other crimes.
Even though Sarah had testimony corroborating her whereabouts, and even
though she did not look like the woman posing as her, the police put more
trust in the identification than in eyewitness testimony or any other
evidence and insisted on pressing charges. For over six months, Sarah's
family had to endure these criminal accusations. A judge finally dropped the
charges, but not before the family had had to incur the expense of an
attorney, and not before her mother was forced to see a specialist to treat a
painful case of lockjaw that resulted from the stress of watching her
daughter's name dragged through the mud.
Lest you think that Sarah's is an isolated case, be aware that identity theft
is an increasingly common crime, one that feeds off the environment of
surveillance in which we live.
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without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior interest
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