Global POV: At the Intersection of Technology and Culture

Hypocritical hill staffers discover privacy

by David Holtzman

Hill staffers are angry at a new website, LegiStorm, that has published their salary information along with personal particulars like bank statements and home address. The information is public and the employees are required by law to submit the particulars annually.

LegiStorm argues that they are publishing the information as a community service and after all, it's publicly available anyway. The staffers are bitterly complaining that it makes them vulnerable to identity theft.

Boo hoo. Cry me a river for the staffers. Congress has in almost every case, voted against protecting the privacy rights of citizens when confronted with an alternative need like national security, freedom of speech or more importantly the influence of powerful lobbyists representing companies like say, AT&T.

Let's see if the Capitol Hill pointyheads can muster up a little more sympathy for the rest of us now that it's happening to them.

Posted on April 09, 2008

Yahoo-Microsoft

by David Holtzman

I have an article here discussing the identity/privacy ramifications of such a transaction in the context of the pending Google acquisition of Double-Click.

Posted on April 08, 2008

THe once and future DNA sample

by David Holtzman

The police can surreptitiously lift your DNA off of discarded cigarette butts, coke cans and water glasses. Although the legality of this technique is still untested in court, it's becoming common practice. Part of what's to blame here is more sophisticated DNA testing methods that can work with increasingly smaller samples.

It's pretty clear that for a myriad of good and practical reasons, law enforcement has been creating uber-databases of all kinds of information, much of which is being done in a legal vacuum.

Posted on April 03, 2008

Bush's Post-presidency Plans

by David Holtzman

President Bush this week, in a rare candid interview with NPR discussed some of his post-presidential plans. Mr. Bush appeared weary as he talked about world travel that he wanted to do that he'd never had time for: "I want to go all over, you know, El Paso, Amarillo, maybe even Galveston."

The greying President showed interest at the suggestion that he could be an owner of another Baseball team. "This time, maybe Manager. Who knows, you know...what about shortstop?"

He laughed. "Actually I was planning on enrolling in the London School of Economics and get my doctorate in a subject that's long interested me, the economic significance of demand-centric markets in newly created democracies." He laughed and asked me to pull his finger.

When asked about the topic that usually consumes most presidents, history, Mr. Bush showed that he was no exception. "I want to be remembered most for my sweet, sweet Iraqi War. And the economy. Oh yeah, how about the new spirit of bipartisan cooperation that I introduced?" We paused while the President laughed hard enough that he began to choke.

The current-but-soon-mercifully-gone President expressed happiness at his greatest accomplishment. "You all never got the dirt on me. My little thingie with the interns. My love child with Condie. Hell, you guys don't even know about my drinkin'" [The President popped open his third beer during the course of the interview]. Hey, you want to snort a coupla lines?"

Vice President Cheney, who had been listening quietly in the room during the interview, declined to answer similar questions as he expressed growing disgust at Bush's answers. When asked directly about his plans after next January, the Veep simply growled, "I thought that I'd f**k your mother, so the next time you kiss her, you get syphilis."

April 1st, right?

Here's a really good one:

Posted on April 01, 2008

TJX handslapped, I get a speeding ticket

by David Holtzman

I got a speeding ticket last month. I was going 40 something in a 25 mph zone. Never mind the fact that the speed limit abruptly dropped when you turned a corner and small-town cop was waiting right there, pulling everyone over and handing them a ticket--I was wrong and I paid them a hundred something bucks and admitted I was guilty by paying the fine by mail.

How come several big companies were hand-slapped by the FTC yesterday for exposing millions of consumer data records and did not have to pay a single penny in fines? TJX, the parent company of Marshalls and TJ Maxx exposed between 45,000,000 and 100,000,000 consumer credit cards because of improper, even unethical handling of credit card information. If they got hit with something nominal in the way of fines, say, $1 per credit card, they would have had to pay...well, do the math. As a matter of fact, they didn't even have to admit that they did wrong. They were made to agree to some token security fixes, but got less punishment than I did for speeding.

How many cases of identity theft will occur out of those 100 million identity breaches? Say, 1 in a 100? That still means 1 million hard luck cases because of a greedy company not treating their customers' personal information with the respect that's deserved. With an average loss of about $5000 per identity theft, that means TJX cost our country at least $5 billion in damages (assuming that the 1% identity theft percentage holds up--actually history would indicate that it would be much higher).

So why didn't the FTC penalize them? Well, they can't. Congress has never given the FTC the right to financially penalize companies for data breaches. There's something that political candidates could debate. As if they would.

Posted on March 28, 2008