“For your safety…”
Poetrooper sends us a disturbing article of Government intrusion into one’s personal information by volunteering your fingerprints at the Post Office. Yes, you now can submit electronic copies of you very own fingerprints for inclusion into the FBI’s data base. But fear not, Citizen! These prints are merely used for your convenience in researching your very own identity history summary check (IdHSC). Also known as a rap sheet. Whatever could go wrong?
It wasn’t all that long ago that the public was made aware of the huge privacy concerns with sharing your DNA with consumer genetic testing companies to find out your origins. One such concern was the ability of the federal government and law enforcement agencies to gain access to your DNA. As the public has become more aware of such privacy concerns, it seems strange that on Friday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) announced a new partnership with the United States Postal Service where customers like you can voluntarily provide them with their fingerprints while you’re at the post office.
Through a partnership between the #FBI and the @USPS, you can now submit your fingerprints electronically for an identity history summary check (IdHSC) while you buy stamps or mail packages.
The program is explained on the FBI website, found here: FBI.gov Adding insult to injury, the FBI will charge a fee to provide you with your own data.
Thanks, Poe. The entire article may be viewed here, PJ Media.com
Log on at your own risk, Citizen. Nothing to see here, move along.
Category: Guest Link, Internet, Legal
The Vermont DMV just confessed that it selling everybody’s information for cash money to anybody.
They made millions off it without our permission and cant say were that money went.
Government never ceases to be a complete and total whorehouse.
Is it too much of a stretch to think that once you’ve done this, they’ll be scannin’ every package as you mail it? Screen has a shot showin’ your name, and if it don’t match that on the thing you’re mailin’ will they ask why you don’t use your own name?
I believe the USPS already does scan and save all non-junk mail. They have been doing so for a while. They use Optical Character Recognition to get the address to rout it. Easy enough to keep the scan. The return address is there.
Prints are a bit more of a challenge, but the tech to see them quickly has existed for decades.
Data storage is now very cheap.
The government’s inept and glacial acquisition process is -not- a guarantee they remain locked in the 1950s.
Various firms are willing to develop people-minder tools for external regimes. Some will even sell to the USA.
We would likely have to amend the Constitution to put any serious limits on such data collection and mining. Putting the death penalty into violations of the 9th and 10th Amendments would likely be required. Doing so for the whole of the Bill of Rights may be necessary.
I say that lat paragraph only half in jest. What used to be a joke is starting to look prophetic.
Too true they scan the mail. They’ll send you a picture of all the mail you’re getting today in an e-mail. It’s called informed delivery.
11B-Mailclerk, just to be clear there are already things in place to keep the federal government from creating databases of information on its citizens and providing those to law enforcement authorities. It is called The Privacy Act of 1974, Public Law 93-579. It does not prevent law enforcement agencies from creating their own databases, but it does prevent them from misusing other databases and limits what can be shared.
Who is actively doing this prevention? I don’t see it. it isn’t permitted. That isn’t the same thing as “prevented” if folks simply ignore the law, and lie about sources.
Shiff has and used ill-gotten phone info. There wont be any sanctions. He wont be the last.
Well, well, well, ain’t this special. Just another tool in their toolbox to keep an eye on us all. Just what they need. For a lot of us it’s a mute point since our prints have been on file for decades anyway. Hell they FIRST got mine as a teenager when I had to be bonded, with a background investigation, in order to be an assistant manager at The Colonel’s Chicken House. Got them again, still as a teenager, upon my enlisting. Another copy when the whole CCW Permitting became a thing. Ma Bell got them too. For a number of years now the State of Georgia has required fingerprints for your driver’s license. I’m pretty sure my DNA is also out there somewhere thru medical records. Haven’t done that whole Ancestry thing tho.
Anybody here DON’T think that everything about you, including condom size, ISN’T on record somewhere? IMO if the Bitch of Benghazi had of been elected, the rounding up of what they considered “enemies of the state” would either be underway now or soon to start. We all know that the FBI is eat up with Clintonites.
DNA ancestry can predict condom size.
You’re a sick, sick individual…
Your fingerprints are already on file if you were ever in the military. They’ve got mine at least three times.
Nothin’ to see here, folks, move along. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for, anyway. Move along.
Those actually go into a different system. It’s separate from the criminal fingerprint databases. Same with the DNA samples they take now from troops on induction.
Other than “look there instead of here”, how is separation maintained?
Who prevents peeking, or even wholesale harvest?
Some folks have written, Animal Farm style, some extra verbiage into the Bill of Rights:
“(Comma) except where the Government wants to disregard this for its own purposes.”
The comma of Tyranny.
Note: The whole of the Constitution was amended. The Bill of Rights is a shackle, not a guidance advisory.
Nothing preventing it other than our adherence to our Constitutional principles and the rule of law. Once we throw out our faith in that, then we can do whatever we want.
Keeping Military databases out of civilian use, is actually easier than other misuses. Mostly because of the maintenance of them on secure networks (i.e. SIPRnet). It takes some authority to just move something to an unclassified network to be accessed by our civilian partners, and most people don’t want to lose their job over simple procedural stuff. Plus we have lately (due to kids like Manning) made it much harder to transfer files off of secure networks.
What could possibly go wrong?
Something that bothers me about the PJ Media story is that it doesn’t identify who is responsible for coming up with the new idea of USPS/FBI collaboration. Which means some faceless bureaucrat is awarded the privacy of not having his name attached to a goofy plan, but individuals can expect fewer protections to safeguard their own privacy. Define irony.
What the policy is effectively doing is deputizing the USPS, working under one government charter, to perform a function of law enforcement under another federal agency. Without putting too fine a point on it, this pretty much makes your mail carrier a Junior G-man.
What this also shows is that Big Government continues to take a page from Big Technology, which either doesn’t understand or care why it pisses people off to have Big Tech put its nose into everybody’s business so long as it will turn a profit.
Those who have been around the block a few times might remember hearing Scott McNealy at Sun Microsystems once say, “You have no privacy. Get over it.”
Another whopper from around the same time was when Google CEO Eric Schmidt said he didn’t understand why anybody would care about privacy unless they were doing something illegal. “Maybe if you’re doing something bad, you should stop doing it.” Schmidt said.
Thanks Eric. That’s sort of like when the Gestapo used to haul people off for an interrogation and say, “Relax. You have nothing to worry about unless you have something to hide.”
The way things are going, it also wouldn’t surprise me if in the near-term it becomes impossible to send or receive mail unless the Post Office has your fingerprints, financial statements, and personal history on file.
Along with a note from your mother…
Lots of folks already voted with their dollars. Most of their business is junk mail.
The FBI has had multiple copies of my fingerprints sent to them.
They use those in criminal background checks, and a number of my paid and volunteer jobs has required a set of prints.
The problem comes with how they intend to use those prints in the future.
There is something to be said about living off the grid.
It actually is impossible to do so. You can reduce your footprint, but you cannot zero it out.
Kazinski was found. Then again, he kept poking the bear.
Trying to live ‘off the grid’ is a huge flag. The less info there is on someone, the more likely it is someone else will decide there is something to be hidden. True anonymity lies in having had 1.3 wives, 2.4 children, and all the rest of the usual camouflage.
Yeah, that’s encouraging…
“Come with me… Or there will be… Trouble”…..
Professor of Italian Art History and Roman History. Currently teaching at Syracuse University, Syracuse NY.
He’s a good actor and a good solid human being, or cyborg if you like…
Is dumbass one word or two? Or is it hyphenated?
During OEF on my first deployment to support mobility processing was a bit hosed up. The good idea fair decided we needed to get nerve agent antidote in auto injectors and doses of anthrax treatment (Cipro) into theater. And instead of packing them properly they just handed them to me and the MCC of the other crew. If we’d been going MILAIR it probably wouldn’t have been a problem. But we were going commercial to BWI then connecting with an AMC charter. They ended up in our carryon as. Those were the days when the National Guard was augmenting TSA. Needless to say it raised eyebrows of the TSA agent. I convinced him to call over one of the Guardsmen who recognized what they were and smoothed over things.
The Government: All your data and your biometrics belong us. Nothing to fear until we come for you with our version of the Gestapo/Stasi.
Folks were ok with this when it was used on “bad people” or “those people”.
“You people” was an obvious consequence, as is “all people”.
On the “hope” side: lots of folks appear to be able to give the finger to -China-. Xi has lost “The Mandate of Heaven”. Folks there seem to have taken inspiration from -us-.
Trump makes fighting Evil look good, and makes Winning look achievable, even easy.
No wonder the Left hates his guts.
“The Government just has your best interests in mind.”
Yeah, and green winged monkeys fly out of my ass when I laugh at something like that.
Try more fiber.
Don’t forget you had to give prints for your drivers license, CCW and upon enlistment, so they have had all of us for a very long time!!
“Attention all planets of the solar federation, we have assumed control
We have assumed control…” ~ 2112 by RUSH
Solar Federation General Order #1 mandates all national governments with the requisite technological capability, to forward their DNA, fingerprinting, financial and banking, and postal data scans to a central interplanetary information repository.
Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, PornHub, and Google to name just a few companies, financially support the maintenance and operation costs of the central data repository.
Citizens, rest easy, all of this is being done to make the New World Order a kinder and gentler place. The type of world George H.W. Bush longed to see.
Maybe the FBI is just trying to capitalize on idiots wanting to do silly stuff, like wanted felons going to win their “free prize”.
Sorry took the play book from the CIA and their creation of the “Selfie” to get facial recognition databases enough data to be useful!
Well this is exactly what happens when both parties view government as a cudgel to be used against those they despise…
There are no longer any parties, and barely any politicians, who are actual limited government conservatives in existence. Both parties and 99% of their members are big government aficionados who love a massive, overarching Federal plutocracy. Today’s Federal government is a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy. As such it exists to strengthen the ability to control the masses of non-wealthy through invasive data collection and spying on every American in the nation through cell phone collections.
Anyone thinking government will ever get smaller or less intrusive is living in a dream state.
The “boot on your neck” party has a left boot and a right boot.