Balloon Juice has a piece on how you can get anyone’s phone records for just over $100. And this evidently surprises not only him but the place he got it. Since the 1970s, the technology has existed to monitor…

Along with their phone numbers, from Henry Hyde and Bob Livingston’s little black book.

But what do all the 1-900 calls mean?

I’m of the opinion that private sector data mining is far more intrusive and potentially damaging than anything the government has been doing.

The annoyance and harm that invasion by private data aggregators is not to be dismissed. It’s major. But it is not even in the same league with the power of government to invade your life and fuck you over.

The main thing that private and government intrusion have in common is that your privacy is singular. You either have it or you don’t. But shrugging at either one of these threats in favor of paying attention to the other is just a gross misunderstanding of the problems.

The other great threat comes from data aggregators that produce a dossier on you using sometimes upwards of a hundred commercial and public records sources. Potential employers, mortgage companies, etc. then make decisions based on the dossier. The problem is the data is often flawed (Florida felon purge, anybody?) and there is no recourse, since “nobody owns the data.” If you can manage to track down the source of the erroneous record, and get them to correct it, and then get them to correct it with the aggregator, you are not only diligent but lucky too. What is probably needed is a strong statutory data integrity/safeguarding/recourse protection along the lines of Germany’s Datenschutz law. What probably prevents this is the extent to which corporate interests control both parties’ handling of lower profile regulatory matters, and that the corporate interests (whether they are aggregators, producers of retail products, or financial institutions) don’t mind losing out on a customer here and there so long as they have greater surety (and can sell more goods) to customers who pass muster. That, and the fact that data aggregation is generally unobtrusive, so many people probably don’t mind data aggregators, as long as their activities lead to more offers of better consumer goods, and the aggregated data doesn’t get in the way of buying a house or getting a job.

I think the President is thinking along the same lines lately. I wonder if “I had my fingers crossed at the time” will be the new “Depends on what the meaning of the word is, is”.

Why are there laws that the majority of people break on a regular basis?

I guess there are two ways to take that. One, why are there laws like that in the first place? And two, why must people break them? I think I generally prefer the first interpretation.

But really, add it to the list of similar imponderables. Like, why don’t the “court costs” in a ticket only go to paying, um, the actual court costs? Or, why is the speed limit set to 45 on the spiffy new thoroughfare with the speed trap on it, but 55 on the rickety old road it connects to? Or, why does the government set itself up to profit from allegedly illegal, immoral, unhealthy, or unsafe behavior in the first place, thus giving it a vested interest in not eliminating (or perhaps even encouraging) such behavior, so as not to eliminate its revenue stream…

This must also be stopped.

http://www.azcentral.com/news/.....cha08.html

Automated speen monitors on a freeway? Blech! Why are there laws that the majority of people break on a regular basis?

What and stand in the way of the Liberterian philosophy and selling anything the public will buy?

That is the Propertarian philosophy—Libertarians and Propertarians split some time ago, but they forgot to let everyone else know.

We can’t do something about this because Congress is owned by the telecom lobbyists.