Irony is not just for laundry

The thunder surrounding the storm over the surrender of customer data by US phone companies to the National Security Agency just keeps on rolling.

Given that my Other Half lives in the US, it's hardly surprising that we talk a fair amount. Living apart for 95% of your relationship is difficult enough, but worrying that the call schedules, frequency, duration and all that jazz is being passed on to people who, frankly, don't have the first damned right to it is a stress I could live without. But that's just background, and not what I was going to write about.

Did you know, though, that such data are frequently bought? Because I didn't. I thought that Uncle Sam just held out his hand and the companies meekly put the data into it. But it seems that when he can't get what he wants by bullying he falls back on that good ol' American method: capitalism. According to a recent report by the Govt Accountability Office, the DoJ, DoS and DHS spend considerable sums (we're talking millions) annually to acquire commercial databases listing finances, phone numbers and biographical information.

Paranoid yet? It gets better.

See, when the Entities Up There collect data on their own behalf, they're bound by the Privacy Act, 1974, which limits how the data can be used and requires disclosure of what the Entities are doing with it. When they buy the data from the commercial sector, however, it's already been collected and collated, and they're just buying the results. The practical upshot of which is that the Fourth Amendment is being rather neatly sidestepped, and the Privacy Act is just so much toilet paper.

(Of course, don't expect them to admit to any of this. The DHS flat-out denied such action and the State Dept. "had no-one available for comment". How strange.)

Paranoid yet? It gets better.

You may or not be aware of the storm in the IT-cup (sorry) regarding Hewlett-Packard's recent spy scandal. For those of you with better things to do than follow such things, it came out in the back half of last year that HP had been using a method called "pretexting" to obtain phone records of its board members in an attempt to determine whether or not something had been leaked by someone to someone else. It's all very shady, I admit, but the fact was that this 1950s-B-movie-spy-thriller method actually worked: HP managed to get the records it wanted, using a team of specially hired sneaks to call up the phone companies and ask, directly or otherwise, for the info. And it worked: the phone companies yielded up the information. (Does this sound familiar yet?)

Cue squeals and cries of "foul!" and much ruckus, resignations en masse, apologies, grovelling on a Biblical scale and all sorts of other things. Oh, and lawsuits galore. Of course the only reason that all this happened is because HP got caught with its hand in the cookie jar: had it gone undetected, nothing would have been said.

You're probably wondering, and rightly, where I'm going with this. Well, here's the payoff. On Friday 12th January 2006 President George W Bush signed into lawmaking illegal the elegant art of pretexting, "the practice of gaining information about a third party's phone use without their permission." (Which is pretty hard on those poor investigators, and damned little praise for their wheedles, but life's cruel like that.) It creates criminal penalties (up to 10 years in chokey) for the "fraudulent or unauthorised acquisition or disclosure of confidential phone records information", according to a statement from the White House.

Maybe it's just me, but I wonder just how many people in the White House have noticed the irony of all this. After all, the US and UK Governments are running the biggest pretexting scam in history.

AND WE'RE LETTING THEM DO IT.

I'd like to think that this means that large swathes of the US Government is going to turn around and impeach itself, but somehow I doubt it's going to happen.