Insight Magazine reports [1] that since 1997, the US Postal Service has been
reporting innocent activity it deems "suspicious" to federal law enforcement
officials. Evidence includes a training video with this chilling
instruction:
"It's better to report 10 legal transactions than
to let one illegal transaction get by."
The risks of a system that presumes guilt until innocence is proven are too
numerous to list here. Not least of them is the impossibility of proving a
negative (I did not intend this cash to be used for illegal purposes). A
similar reporting system in the banking arena is known to generate ratio of
99,999 false positives for every true positive. Yes, I do mean a ratio of
10^5:1 errors to correct results. I can't imagine any other system in which
that error rate would be acceptable.
The information on suspicious activities is, of course, kept in a database
controlled in secret and used for purposes no one is willing to discuss.
The Post Office will not discuss the parameters used to flag "suspicious"
activity, though the video states that unwillingness to give out personal
information such as date of birth and/or produce identification papers is
automatically suspicious.
Someone help me verify that I'm still living in America, please? [*]
[1] http://www.moreprivacy.com/editorials/postaleye.htm
Alan Wexelblat http://wex.www.media.mit.edu/people/wex/
CHI'02 Panels Chair, moderator, rec.arts.sf.reviews
[* Alex, Yes, you are. But privacy is continually being eroded,
despite the best efforts of the Risks Forum, the Privacy Forum at
http://www.vortex.com/privacy, EPIC at http://www.epic.org, EFF at
http://www.eff.org, Zero Knowledge at http://www.zeroknowledge.com,
to name just a few. PGN] [Graystreak via risks-digest Volume 21, Issue 54]
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