|
Donations |
|
 |
|
|
|
If you found this site helpful, please donate to help keep it online
Don't want to use PayPal? Try our physical address
|
|
|
Survey |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Translate |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| View previous topic :: View next topic |
| Author |
Message |
JackBenny
Sergeant
Joined: Jul 12, 2002
Posts: 140
Location: USA
|
 Posted: Mon Dec 16, 2002 11:43 am Post subject: Keeping Track of John Poindexter |
|
|
Now this, to me, is a good idea.........
| Quote: |
The head of the government's Total Information Awareness project, which aims to root out potential terrorists by aggregating credit-card, travel, medical, school and other records of everyone in the United States, has himself become a target of personal data profiling.
Online pranksters, taking their lead from a San Francisco journalist, are publishing John Poindexter's home phone number, photos of his house and other personal information to protest the TIA program.
Matt Smith, a columnist for SF Weekly, printed the material -- which he says is all publicly available -- in a recent column: "Optimistically, I dialed John and Linda Poindexter's number -- (301) 424-6613 -- at their home at 10 Barrington Fare in Rockville, Md., hoping the good admiral and excused criminal might be able to offer some insight," Smith wrote.
"Why, for example, is their $269,700 Rockville, Md., house covered with artificial siding, according to Maryland tax records? Shouldn't a Reagan conspirator be able to afford repainting every seven years? Is the Donald Douglas Poindexter listed in Maryland sex-offender records any relation to the good admiral? What do Tom Maxwell, at 8 Barrington Fare, and James Galvin, at 12 Barrington Fare, think of their spooky neighbor?"
Smith said he wrote the column to demonstrate the sense of violation he felt over his personal records being profiled by secretive government agencies.
"I needed to call Poindexter anyway, and it seemed like a worthy concept that if he's going to be compiling data that most certainly will leak around to other departments and get used, one way to get readers to think about it was to turn that around," Smith said.
What Smith didn't realize was that Poindexter's phone number and other information would end up on more than 100 Web pages a week later as others took up the cause.
Phone-phreaking hackers supplied details on the Verizon switch serving the admiral's home. The popular Cryptome privacy-issues website posted satellite photos of the house.
Poindexter could not be reached for comment for this story, and calls to his home phone now reach a recording: "The party you are calling is not available at this time."
Since the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency began awarding contracts for the Total Information Awareness project in August, the effort has been criticized by both civil rights advocates and data-mining experts.
The dispute over TIA seems to fall not along straight political party lines, but between advocates and opponents of the government's right to monitor its own citizens. Former President Clinton expressed support for the project in a recent public appearance, while conservative New York Times columnist William Safire recently wrote a pointed editorial criticizing the idea.
One Bush voter, speaking on condition of anonymity, said of the pranks on Poindexter: "If they're making him as uncomfortable as we are, good." |
Clandestinely replicated from http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56860,00.html
|
|
| Back to top |
|
 |
|
|
|
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum
You cannot attach files in this forum
You can download files in this forum
|
Powered by phpBB 2.0.8a © 2001 phpBB Group
Version 2.0.6 of PHP-Nuke Port by Tom Nitzschner © 2002 www.toms-home.com
Version 2.2 by Paul Laudanski © 2003-2004 Computer Cops
|
You can syndicate our news using the file RSS 0.91, ultramode.txt, or RSS 1.0.
Forum FAQ
Search
Usergroups
Profile
Login to check your private messages
Login
