Spy on Me, Please

www.gilson.uni.cc ^ | Michael Gilson De Lemos

[Sir Gawain]

Spy on Me, Please

by Michael Gilson De Lemos

I recently learned that (here) the government has begun to use people's credit reports in what will surely be denounced as yet another bizarre, unconstitutional plot against our Civil Liberties — and milepost towards the Total Police State.

FBI, CIA, and maybe even ONI agents, bravely waving Patriot Act authorizations over their heads like manhole covers, can at last find out what a wily and subtle Libertarian like me is up to, instead of, for example, reading my articles here.

For my part, I hope it is all true. If they look at my credit report, I can sleep sound in the knowledge I am as impenetrable as a KGB mole and as mysterious as James Bond in a Clouseau movie. No master of identity theft could have made me more unrecognizable than the perverse interaction of government regulation, exemptions, and interference in the credit card industry has already done.

While little known, if this is any kind of model for the future, the one guarantor of privacy may be government attempts to find out what those pesky citizens are doing.

A Strange Phenomenon

Some time ago I ordered my three credit reports from the major services. That there are just 3 services — where there used to be one in every town — in a rambling federation of nearly 300 million people should be a warning light right there.

It used to be credit bureaus were locally based, saw their mission as recording good credit and not so much ferreting out people who were behind, and were scrupulous in that they were in general legally liable for any errors both to you and the store ordering the report.

This positive philosophy meant people there were interested in getting verifiable information from people who personally knew you. It also took account of people's habits in paying different trades — many tradesmen were not interested in billing people monthly and saw credit extension as a valuable advertising.

As my father characterized it, a recommendation from your bank is good, but if you had a good record with a tailor or haberdasher it was gold.

Obliging bureaus even noted glowing recommendations from your mother. It wasn't perfect but it was personal. Misinformation was readily corrected in most cases.

Government changed all that.

A complex set of needs — tracking down tax liens, the ease of dealing (for government) with a few agencies instead of one, special regulatory exemptions, higher taxes — led to the impetus for changing the industry. As government encouraged the creation of credit bureau combines, it mercilessly prosecuted small local ones on various charges, including, improbably, restraint of trade and monopoly. The combines were exempted from liability and soon evolved into impersonal bureaucracies that took forever to make anything happen. Many took to outright lying to produce "reports" and took in information that was useless to tradesmen. Nonetheless, tradesmen found they had to use the services as that was increasingly all that was there: in one case those who didn't, had false information put in their own credit reports; and bureaus found that now they had to create monthly reports — paradoxically, the less they knew you personally the more legally invulnerable their information became.

After a periodic series of scandals in the '50s and '60s things came to a head when management consultants discovered most of the information was inaccurate — and Libertarians revealed the government was using the reports to not only spy on people, but manipulate reports to ruin people.

Congress intervened to halt the "abuses of the market" which were really what resulted from what it itself had cynically or unwittingly engineered.

While the 1974 Privacy Act halted some problems — it re-hatched them in embryo with new provisions allowing government spying.

The result is a regulated system exempt from responsibility — providing arguably anything except credit reporting.

Its corrupt systems have spread to banking, credit cards, medical d-bases, foreign countries — infuriating consumers while bringing more "corrective" legislation and (here) Mobius-strip-like errors in its train.

Some years ago, someone with a State Attorney General's office told me the AG was startled one day to have arrest warrants and hundreds of credit "derogs" or derogatories against him — based, it turned out, on the fact that as chief law enforcement officer, he appeared on numerous legal documents on routine business.

I suppose a man involved in so many lawsuits is suspicious.

More: Governments depend on inaccuracy — in a cynical racket that abuses the doctrine of escheat (here) and where they seize inactive accounts as abandoned after a few years, and depend on the inaccuracy of credit reports to strip widows, residents in foreign lands, toddlers, seniors in nursing homes, and absent minded people of millions every year.

Your bank may know darn well your aunt is in the hospital and that is why she has not added to her savings account and where everybody is. But if her address is wrong in a report — tough. The government can seize it.

A few years ago I did a management systems analysis for a major credit card company. I discovered that 87% of files were inaccurate; they sent two-thirds of notices after the due date; and requests for investigation were routinely dumped in the garbage. Everything you suspected in your most paranoid frustrations over whacky dunning letters and misplaced payments was, I learned, true. The reason for the analysis? The government was buying their system as a model for use in the security services and spy agencies — and installation abroad. Government was deeply interested in how not being liable for accuracy affected the flow of information.

The Present Day

Now there are growing reports that under the present security regime, people are being pulled off flights and even police agents find themselves not only arrested but re-arrested through inaccurate databases impossible to correct, or, if corrected, then generate new errors with geometric lunacy.

Worse: Government (here) Agents are calling up employers asking them to fire "undesirable" citizens.

While the Government Agents were — after one dismissed employee realized why he was on the unemployment line and blew the whistle — reprimanded, they were not fired: and far more important is it took persistent complaints to expose the misbehavior. No automatic systems of supervision exist; and the employees are making the interesting defense that under the Patriot Act they are justified.

Government officials calling your boss and putting a scandalous spin on legal activities such as owning a gun or thinking "odd" things like the country is riddled by petty tyrants is bad enough — but wait until Government officials, untouchable thanks to Sovereign Immunity doctrines, repeat to intimidated employers the science-fiction on your credit report.

It is not an accident. It was set in motion by government planners decades ago. As Hayek says: Planned Chaos, Unintended Consequences.

The Biggist Lie

Increasingly, as celebrated defense attorneys such as Johnny Cochran (here) and Gerry Spence have noted, many juries just assume that if you're in the dock, with 12 years of public school conformism, all that gee-whiz spy stuff and our upright police you are probably guilty anyway. Increasingly, the "winnability" of a case is based on the defense attorney's willingness to spend most of his opening statement explaining what burden of proof actually means. Once the jury gets that — as happened in the OJ case — government stand-bys like concocted evidence, emotionally satisfying but logically inept non-sequiturs, perjuring racist police officers with boy-scout looks, mumbling judges hailed as the best on the bench with outrageously pro-prosecutor rulings, and arrogantly contaminated evidence lose their star quality.

Not that old-party politicians run governments that really care any more about what secrets you hold than the opinions you hold. Let me say what history reveals and people fear to admit: they just care about appearing to care. Corrupt Governments have historically no interest any longer in accurate information: they arrest people and grill them on outrageous charges, hoping they'll blurt something they can use or seems to justify what they want believed.

They need the extraordinary powers so citizens will assume they know something, and it is all in a talismanic secret Dossier somewhere that courts say they can't let the jury see but may rely upon.

Unintended consequences? Who's fooling whom? The Biggest Lie of Big Lies is that Governments need "accurate" data.

C'mon, where courts all but issue warrants, as the law school joke goes, against a ham sandwich if so requested and Prosecutors embellish like Picasso whatever pathetic evidence they do have, what need have Governments to spy on anyone anyway, or develop "more accurate" information?

Ancient shamans and juju men compelled obedience holding up ritual objects they claimed could see in men's souls. Was their interest in psychic accuracy or obedience by confused followers?

Now, beyond the Dossier and Secret information Government may not disclose lest "We compromise Our Sources," now advances in Modern Government Science have given us the War on Terror equivalent: the government managed credit report, soon to be filled with even more extraneous if not mystical juju-like "information."

What to do? I have long said that a powerful Libertarian strategy to government is absolute obedience. Often it confuses and crashes the system in a way street protests or revolutionary strorming the gates never will.

And so with Credit Reports. After years of scrupulously filling out reports and diligently correcting information, I can say one credit report of mine is tolerably accurate.

The others are a mess, like a virus awaiting injection into the government nervous system.

A Trojan Horse

Fabled Troy never had to fear from a Trojan Horse like the Credit Report the US Government is so anxious to see. Mine is, as I indicated, after years of honest correction and numerous letters and calls, a shining example of bizarre mis-statement — like, according to some industry studies, over a third of the over 90% that (here) contain some major inaccuracy.

Any government official who reads my credit report as gospel has jumped down Alice's bunny-hole. He has entered a Labyrinth that would give the Minotaur a headache. Consider:

The government may confidently flag me on potentially hiding out terrorists at phantom addresses, wondering why I still have tax liens outstanding since before I was born on property I have never owned.

Not to mention the open utility account in a building long demolished 10 States away, and the credit card in good standing for a department store long closed.

Or discover that according to one old report, I was summonsed by the city for keeping 469 people in a 4 room house. This even has outside verification: it ended up in the Carnegie Mellon University student newspaper, where vapidly gullible ("But it's a court document!") Leftist Physics Students of Tomorrow playing Jimmy Olsen accepted as gospel the government suit. If 469 phantom technical students isn't spoor of WMD's or at least a suspicious terrorist operation, well, what is?

But I can sternly blame the judge who threw out the administrative error, whose name mysteriously then appeared as my business partner years thereafter before it was removed as stale information, showing conclusively that Angels keep an eye on me.

Or if they point out a Michael F. Tilson is bearing my address somewhere, I can patriotically retort that they have the wrong man, and I also am not Micheal Gibson, Carme De Lemos — or the sinister-sounding and doubtless Islamic if not Kaddafy-sponsored terrorist, Micha El Giblemi.

If worse comes to worse, I can explain that I apparently had a sex change operation and shortly thereafter became actually dead.

For it has been verified several times by the Credit Reporting Company: which reports in collection that I have been dunned for my departed mother's debts, long paid, for 7 years to prove it — and as "re-verified" on request by creditors as worthy as the phone monopoly in a State where she never lived and a local medical facility.

The Hindu hospital administrator stopped helping me or returning calls shortly thereafter when my mother's debts appeared on, I was told, his credit report.

Or even not there at all: as my credit card showed once I was simultaneously in St. Petersburg, Florida and St. Petersburg, Russia, while I was in fact in Dallas, Texas on that day, interestingly enough in Dealy Plaza with my wife, researching a possible article on JFK.

Oswald was next to me.

That is assuming they can find me. Anyone who comes searching for me based on one report will find that my address not only will have seemed to have been swallowed by a mysterious space warp, but a good part of my zip code is gone as if (here) Steven King's "The Langoliers" were in the neighborhood, munching space-time into oblivion. But I will not blame them if they give up.

I have given up.

When I apply for credit, I simply hope like an innocent 5 year old confiding to his puppy. Perhaps the universe does reward middle-aged men like me for retaining after the hurdles of life some unrtarnished vestige of this admirable quality. For recently, a store extended me credit confiding they "adjusted" my record to get past their computerized system since they had learned that they could safely ignore 4 derogatory items — since in their experience 5 of 6 were inaccurate.This was so impressive a friend said she was increasingly convinced I was indeed a Man Sent From Above to guide suffering humanity in a time of trial. Another opined more cynically that I was if not Tuttle, then the Anti-Buttle, referring respectively to the anti-government hero played by De Niro, and the unfortumate victim of a bureaucratic error in the (here) hit movie Brazil.

I confess when my patience is stretched people say I look like Robert De Niro with piles.

A Credit Reporting agency, with manic, Government-like logic, recently tried to lure me back into scribbling complaints by charging me for my previously volunteer effort — it asked if I would like to join a sort of club for a substantial fee to get my latest report "free" and then update information.

I declined. They do so well on their own.

Yes, we need credit reports of a sort all right. What this world needs is accurate credit reporting that consumers can use — on credit agencies, businesses, politicians, and government agencies — marking as derogatory every institutional lawsuit, broken promise, or budgetary overrun.

Who knows? With a little luck in this new system, the entire country may enjoy a re-birth of privacy as entire States disappear, with prosecutors hoist by their own petard: buried under a mountain of computerized arrest warrants.

Or my name isn't El Giblemi.

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Michael Gilson-de Lemos co-founded the Libertarian International Organization (www.libertarian.uni.cc) and is on the National Committeee of the US Libertarian Party. For more of his contrarian and informative commentary see his site, www.gilson.uni.cc

[Sir Gawain]

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[Ford Fairlane]

Agents are calling up employers asking them to fire "undesirable" citizens

I know from experience this is true. One of my clients was told by a FBI agent to fire one of his young project engineers - it seems the young man's father is involved in something the government didnt like & they were trying to lean on him to testify, even though he hadn't spoken to his father since leaving home for college.

My client was told he would be harrassed if he didn't cooperate.

Having friends in the right places, we arranged for the FBI man (who drank too much & had a healthy libido) to be (he claims entrapped) by a male vice officer dressed as a female prostitute

we then told the local DA (another friend of ours) the whole story

end of problem & the agents career, I hope

[america-rules]

The credit reports don't tell you Sh*t.

If you want to know everyone you pay money too, who your billers are, who in your faimily owes money, where they live and a hundred other things that a credit report doesn't tell you look here !