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more on State Department Link Will Open Visa Database to Police Officers
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 14:04:29 -0500
------ Forwarded Message From: Ross Stapleton-Gray <amicus () well com> Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 10:16:26 -0800 To: dave () farber net, ip <ip () v2 listbox com> Subject: Re: [IP] State Department Link Will Open Visa Database to Police Officers At 10:54 PM 1/30/03 -0500, Dave Farber wrote:
State Department Link Will Open Visa Database to Police Officers ... WASHINGTON, Jan. 30 - Law enforcement officials across the country will soon have access to a database of 50 million overseas applications for United States visas, including the photographs of 20 million applicants. ... "The availability of this information will change police conduct," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which has advocated more Congressional oversight of domestic security operations. "You are more likely to stop someone if you have the ability to query a database."
I'd go further than Marc, here; availability of such a database, to a huge community of new users, invites all sorts of flavor of abuse. We (citizens, and concerned public servants) ought to demand and ensure appropriate oversight, and monitoring of how this thing ends up being used. That ought to be a general concern: more effective use of information by government isn't the problem, it's abuse of greater knowledge that's the problem. In this particular case, an enormous collection of information is to be made available to a very large and diverse set of new users, who'll have various motives (and some, doubtless, less than pure) for use, and who'll report to various agencies, state and local governments, etc., with varying degrees of interested and ability to oversee their operations. One might easily imagine a corrupt police department using the State Department's database to extract information to further criminal activities (e.g., putting the squeeze on drug dealers' families), or, worse, penetrations of U.S. law enforcement by foreign criminal organizations (we need to avoid the situation where, if the Cali Cartel turns a single sheriff's office, they can mine the State Department's records--albeit just "sensitive but unclassified" ones--on anyone, anywhere with an interest in a U.S. visa). The State Department has underinvested in information technology for a long, long time, and I don't imagine it will come out of the box with a bulletproof solution to what is a hard problem: sharing sensitive information with a large community with varying "needs to know," and with little means to authenticate actual users and uses. I'd be interested in hearing how this develops; having spent a chunk of my career in the Intelligence Community, and among the foreign embassies in Washington D.C. (http://www.embassy.org), I know there are a lot of interesting and useful things that might be done, but there are as many ways to do them wrong... Ross amicus () well com http://www.fuzzycloud.com ------ End of Forwarded Message ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To unsubscribe or update your address, click http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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- more on State Department Link Will Open Visa Database to Police Officers Dave Farber (Jan 31)