Damn!
I look at ebay and those 30 round mag "kits," and shake my head at class 3 items, but are they forwarding all this info to Uncle Sam? Does the .Gov profile anyone who is logged in to note what auctions they bid on, or even just look at?
From another bulletin board,
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Buyer Beware
eBay Security Chief Turns Website Into Arm of the Law
[url]http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030707&c=1&s=engle[/url]
by Jonah Engle
Speaking at a conference this winter on Internet crime, eBay.com's
http://www.ebay.com/ director of law enforcement and compliance, Joseph
Sullivan, offered law-enforcement officials extensive access to personal
customer information.
Founded in 1995 as a niche site for collectibles, eBay http://www.ebay.com/
quickly grew into one of the Internet's largest websites, currently
boasting 69 million daily visitors, who place an average of 7.7 million
bids each day. The company, now valued at $29.6 billion, has become
synonymous with online shopping, and is rapidly expanding overseas.
The talk, "Working with Law Enforcement," was delivered at the CyberCrime
2003 conference in Mashantucket, Connecticut. Sullivan, who left the
Justice Department to become senior counsel for rules, trust and safety at
eBay last year, told the audience of law-enforcement officials and industry
executives that he didn't "know another website that has a privacy policy
as flexible as eBay's," seemingly meaning that eBay acts particularly
quickly to grant law enforcement extensive access to user information
without regard to established legal procedures that protect individuals
from civil rights abuses by the state.
Brags Sullivan, "If you are a law-enforcement officer, all you have to do
is send us a fax with a request for information, and ask about the person
behind the seller's identity number, and we will provide you with his name,
address, sales history and other details--all without having to produce a
court order." (eBay itself goes further than this, employing six
investigators who are charged with tracking down "suspicious people" and
"suspicious behavior.")
Seventy percent of eBay customers, as well as a significant portion of the
rest of the online commercial world, make their purchases using
(eBay-owned) Paypal, which provides clearing services for online financial
transactions. Through Paypal, eBay has access to the financial records of
tens of millions of customers. "If you contact me," said Sullivan to
assembled law-enforcement authorities, "I will hook you up with the Paypal
people. They will help you get the information you're looking for.... In
order to give you details about credit-card transactions, I have to see a
court order. I suggest that you get one, if that's what you're looking for."
Sullivan even offered to conscript eBay's employees in virtual sting
operations: "Tell us what you want to ask the bad guys. We'll send them a
form, signed by us, and ask them your questions. We will send their answers
directly to your e-mail."
Sullivan's statements were first reported by Yuval Dror in the Tel
Aviv-based daily Ha'aretz; surprisingly, they have received no coverage in
the US media. And, while they may seem extreme, Sullivan's eBay policies
seem to fit into a larger pattern of eroding online privacy.
I n the fall of 2001 a Stanford-educated Pakistani scientist, a permanent
resident of the United States, was visited at his home in the Bay Area by
the FBI, who asked about several books he'd recently purchased on eBay. The
man's lawyer said the FBI agent reported having been alerted by eBay. eBay
denied having provided the information to the FBI, and the bureau refused
to comment.
eBay avoids legal trouble with its customers by giving itself carte blanche
to divulge any and all personal information. Its hard-to-find privacy
policy says: "Due to the existing regulatory environment, we cannot ensure
that all of your private communications and other personal information will
never be disclosed in ways not otherwise described in this Privacy Policy."
Until recently, in the Internet world "cooperation with government was seen
as a betrayal of the unwritten contract between the user and service
provider," says Nimrod Kozlovski of the Information Society Project, a
Yale-based center that studies democracy and freedom in the digital age.
This understanding held that the "provider would protect the consumer from
government snooping." Kozlovski believes that "September 11th changed
things dramatically," much as it did for privacy and civil-liberties issues
in other realms. He observes that eBay followed the trend by rebranding
itself and changing its privacy and policy statements "to accommodate this
new vision of the company as one which was [not only] cooperative with the
government [but] actually a private law enforcement entity." eBay has also
felt the sting of tough new laws: On March 28 its unit PayPal was charged
by the Justice Department with violating the Patriot Act for providing
money transfer services to gambling companies. eBay may be wary of turning
down law-enforcement requests, and in this political climate, being pliant
to law enforcement may be sound business in the sense that it can lead to
better treatment from government and lower administrative costs associated
with a company's security division. There is also the genuine anxiety
surrounding the potential consequences of not following up on a perceived
terrorist threat.
Company spokesperson Kevin Pursglove calls eBay "a pioneer when it comes to
customer privacy" and denies that eBay's privacy rules are in any way
influenced by increased concerns about homeland security or that eBay has
been the subject of increased pressure from law enforcement.
The attack on Internet privacy, like all civil liberties, has been growing
since September 11 in the form of the Patriot Act and other federal and
state-based legislation. Many provisions in the new laws undermine online
privacy, and are in keeping with eBay's information-sharing policies. The
Patriot Act allows ISPs to voluntarily hand over all "non-content"
information to law enforcement without the need for a court order or
subpoena. It also expands the category of information that law-enforcement
figures can seek with a simple subpoena (no court review required) to
include, among other things, IP addresses and credit card and bank account
numbers.