FC: Your grocery list may bring a terror probe, from the Village Voice

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

---

From: George () Orwellian Org
To: "Paul Wolf" <paulwolf () icdc com>, "Declan McCullagh" <declan () well com>
Subject: Ordering pizza using a credit card
Date: Sun, 28 Jul 2002 15:50:21 -0400

http://villagevoice.com/issues/0230/baard.php
#
#        Your Grocery List Could Spark a Terror Probe
#        Buying Trouble
#        by Erik Baard
#        July 24 - 30, 2002
#
#    They thought they were making routine purchases-the innocent,
#    everyday pickups of charcoal and hummus, bleach and sandwich
#    bags, that keep the modern household running. Regulars at a
#    national grocery chain, these thousands and thousands of shoppers
#    used the store's preferred-customer cards, in the process putting
#    years of their lives on file. Perhaps they expected their records
#    would be used by marketers trying to better target consumers.
#    Instead, says the company's privacy consultant, the data was
#    used by government agents hunting for potential terrorists.
#
#    The saga began with a misguided fit of patriotism mere weeks
#    after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, when a
#    corporate employee handed over the records-almost literally,
#    the grocery lists-to federal investigators from three agencies
#    that had never even requested them. In a flash, the most quotidian
#    of exchanges became fodder for the Patriot Act.
#
#    When the company's legal counsel discovered the breach, she turned
#    for advice to Larry Ponemon, CEO of the consulting firm Privacy
#    Council and a former business ethics professor at Babson College
#    and SUNY. "I told her it's better to be transparent," Ponemon
#    recalls. "Send a notice to loyalty cardholders telling them what
#    happened. She agreed and presented that to the board but they
#    said, 'No, we don't want to hand a smoking gun to litigators.'
#    " The attorney, who has since resigned from the grocery chain,
#    declined through Ponemon to be interviewed or to identify herself
#    or her former employer. To this day, the customers haven't been
#    informed.
#
#    "It wasn't a case of law enforcement being egregiously intrusive
#    or an evil agency planting a bug or wiretap. It was a marketing
#    person saying, 'Maybe this will help you catch a bad guy,' "
#    Ponemon says.
[snip --DBM]
To read the full article, pull up the URL.

What happens when the FBI is "pressed" to succeed:
http://foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,58900,00.html
#
#    Mob Informant Scandal Involved Highest Levels of FBI
#
#    Saturday, July 27, 2002
#
#    BOSTON - For more than 20 years, FBI headquarters in Washington
#    knew that its Boston agents were using hit men and mob leaders
#    as informants and shielding them from prosecution for serious
#    crimes including murder, the Associated Press has learned.
#
#    Until now, the still-unraveling Boston FBI scandal has been
#    portrayed largely as the work of a handful of local agents -
#     mavericks willing to deal with the devil to bring down a Mafia
#    family.
#
#    But documents obtained by the AP directly connect FBI headquarters
#    to a pattern of collusion with notorious killers.
#
#    The AP found 20 memos from Boston agents to the FBI director's
#    office, along with six replies, showing that headquarters was
#    told of the abuses and condoned them.
#
#    Written between 1964 and 1987, the memos made it clear to
#    Washington that the informants had killed and were likely to
#    kill again, describing one of them as "the most dangerous
#    individual known" in the Boston area. The memos also alerted
#    headquarters that two of the informants were crime bosses, active
#    "at the policy-making level" of criminal enterprises in Boston.
[snip] 




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