John Gilmore is calling for an early demonstration of how bad convicted felon Poindexter's Total Information Awareness campaign will be. This demonstration will consist of the compiling of as much personal, lawfully obtained info as we can about John M. and Linda Poindexter of 10 Barrington Fare, Rockville, MD, 20850, +1 301 424 6613.
It would be good to have an early public demonstration of just how bad life could become for such targeted citizens. While ratfink's system is probably not working yet, and a large part of it is classified, much of it can be manually simulated for demonstration purposes. Public records can be manually searched and then posted to the net by people who happen to be looking there for something else. Many Internet public records search sites also exist; try searching for "People finder". (Matt Smith at matt.smith@sfweekly.com has offered to "publish anything that readers can convincingly claim to have obtained legally".) Photographs and videos of the target, their house, car, family, and associates, can be made and circulated to demonstrate facial recognition techniques.
Employees at various businesses and organizations such as airlines, credit card authorizers, rental-car agencies, shops, gyms, schools, tollbooths, garbage services, banks, taxis, honest civil servants and police officers, and restaurants could demonstrate denial of service to such targeted people. A simple "We won't serve YOUR KIND OF PEOPLE" would do, as was practiced on black people for many decades. More subtle forms of denial of service are possible, such as "You've been 'randomly' selected as a security risk, I'll have to insist that [some degrading thing happen to you]". Or merely, "I can't seem to get this credit card to work, sir, and those twenties certainly look counterfeit to me."
Those with access to DMV and criminal records databases, credit card records, telephone bills, tax records, birth and death and marriage records, medical records, and similar personally identifiable databases could combine their information publicly to assist in the demonstration. This is how TIA is intended to work — the government would get privileged access to all these databases, access that the rest of us do not normally have. But some of us have access to various of these databases today, and can demonstrate how the TIA system might work.
(via Aaron Swartz)
