Yes, AFAIK. It's still "voluntary" in that a child can refuse to do it if they're willing to raise enough stink and make a scene. Of course, one could paint their fingers with nail polish on that day, too...
Do the schools have to get the parent's permission somehow? This can't seem like a situation where the child has to make a commotion in order to not consent.
They took ours when I was in third or fourth grade (so early 80's). They took us on a field trip to a police station and everybody lined up to have their fingerprints taken - I don't know if they actually kept them or did anything with them, though.
What? Did you ever find out what the fingerprints were used for?
This is like taking a DNA sample from child when they're born nowadays, it seems harmless now, but we can already see companies using this kind of data maliciously.
In the US it was very common. My kids did it at school in the 90s.
The point was that if your child goes missing, you have their fingerprints available so they can be used in investigations. In our case, the fingerprints were given to us to take home in case they were ever needed. At the time I didn't think to ask if the police kept a record for themselves, but I doubt it (just because local PD wasn't very organized).
I still have my card from the early 80s, in semi rural Oregon. The way I remember it (with a caveat of me being six) was it was the only copy. I don't think my parents would have done it if the government was keeping one.
Some department head got patted on the back, and a bunch of "analysts" burned 10 times what it should have taken to put this together. They're all getting salaries, good retirement benefits, and the satisfying feeling of having ended child exploitation (or at least telling people that).
It makes me wonder if downloading this app gives the FBI a ready made backdoor into your iPhone. (not sure if that's even possible with the iOS infrastructure)
What if just one employee works for the FBI? We don't need to guess about that sort of stuff, supposedly Apple has complied with PRISM for nearly a decade now. I'd bet there's a lot more than just one US intelligence officer working at Apple.
Apple would have to be complicit. And at that point, why tie it to an app that almost nobody will download? Just build it into iOS/iCloud and call it a day.
There's no way of saying it without sounding sarcastic that yes, this feels like a scam, if not just a bad idea. The fact that they have to come out and say, "no, we're not storing pictures of your kids" doesn't help. The idea of the app is sound, and one would hope you could trust the Federal Government with such information (like they don't have it already), but the iOS6 era screenshots and verbiage feel like a real scam.
> Gov't is mandated to use AWS Gov instances which are quite easy to distinguish
That's not, in fact, true. The certifications that apply to AWS Gov make it easier to meet certain government compliance rules that apply to certain categories of data, but it is possible to meet the standards on a platform that isn't certified or certified to a lower level (but it means more administrative work for the org using the platform) and many Commercial AWS offerings have FedRAMP certifications, anyhow. I work in an org touched by FedRAMP, and which is almost entirely on AWS commercial, not Gov.
If I was going to download /any/ app from the App Store in which to store pictures and factual data about my kids, I would hope I could trust the FBI more than Joe's App Shack or another anonymous developer. But in this case, if they're not going to tend to their app and it's marketing site, hard pass.
You don't even have to assume tinfoil hattery to think that a future update might phone home -- just a change in internal politics / leadership can lead to that.
Installing any kind of channel back to the FBI on an Android device from who-knows-where with who-knows-what malware running on it feels like a disaster waiting to happen.
> Parents were the perpetrators in more than 90 percent of kidnappings and abductions
3. The app is to store photos of your kid? Just use your camera gallery. I guarantee it's easier to use than the FBI's clunky app (inferred from their screenshot of a 10-year-old iOS version)
4. This is life, you can't solve everything with an app. Get your head out of your phone and open your eyes and look for your kid, they're probably one store down at the arcade
After the July 4 mass shooting a 2 year old was found wondering the scene unattended. He was safely returned to relatives. Sure I have pictures of my kids but am I alive to display them?
A lot of people have social media, or send photos to their family. My wife and myself send photos of our baby to close relatives across the country all the time. I know every situation is different though. It's an unmaintained app is another issue.
The same reason the government produces actually half decent financial literacy courses aimed from kids to adults. The same reason the CDC has instructions on how to brush your teeth. The same reason why the FDA will literally give you cooking tips for peas.
There is some class of people out there who don't understand or aren't capable and the government is acting as a gap filler.
While i understand the skepticism, at least they are trying to streamline a process. a quick search reveals the startling statistic:
Every 40 seconds, a child goes missing or is abducted in the United States. Approximately 840,000 children are reported missing each year. having access to rapid id/photo. Minutes are precious. I'm no expert but + for fbi, minus for the cynics. Just my 2 cents
> But contrary to the dominant narrative, nearly all child abductions are perpetrated by family members. Stranger abductions — certainly alarming and tragic — actually occur with “lightning-strike rarity,” as a report in the journal Criminal Justice Studies put it, in contrast to the more than 200,000 parental abductions committed each year that meet the criminal criteria and are not merely delayed visitations or misunderstandings.
And the 840k number massively overstates actual active cases; reports can be solved in a matter of minutes/hours, like a lost kid at an amusement park.
> Therefore, of the 365,348 missing children (between the age of 0 and 17) reports recorded in 2020, only 30,396 – or about 8% – were still active cases at the end of the year.
That stat is shared among parents so much. "840,000 missing a year" in a nation of 73 million children is interpreted as meaning in any given year you have a 1 in 87 chance of never seeing your child again at any given time.
My brother won't return his shopping cart to the shopping cart return area because, in those 30 seconds where his back is turned, someone is likely to take his children. One parent told me they take it one step further and they won't use passenger door to put their children in the car. Instead, they reach through the car from the driver's door. This way they don't have to walk around the car which would allow someone to take their child.
I've suggested just locking the children in the car but it seems like solving the wrong problem, really.
> One parent told me they take it one step further and they won't use passenger door to put their children in the car. Instead, they reach through the car from the driver's door. This way they don't have to walk around the car which would allow someone to take their child.
I do not think that access to digital photos and measurements has been a limiting factor in finding abductees. In fact, with the ubiquity of cameras on nearly every device nowadays along with social media we routinely see amateurs dig up information faster than authorities are able to put it out officially.
There's a funny rendering problem with the pdf brochure where their assurance that it's not collecting information is split up and pasted in the wrong places. Making the document start with this sentence: "collecting or storing any photos
or information that you enter in the app".
Yup. It's just that they went out of their way to answer it... Almost like they're worried people won't download the app if they didn't say it upfront.
There's a television ad that stands out in my memory from when I was a kid (80s). The camera pans across patrons at a diner and the voiceover is about how a kidnapped child was recovered as the camera stops on a young girl (~8yo). The child is described, but the child the camera landed on has different features (hair dyed, cut, whatever). The explanation for how she was identified is that her fingerprints were on file. The message? Get your children fingerprinted!
In adulthood, I've often thought back to that ludicrous ad. No child's fingerprints are getting checked unless some foul play is already suspected. The likelihood that the child would fall into police custody and get checked is already slim; fingerprints aren't going to help until that happens. We don't have campaigns to fingerprint children as a proactive precaution today (of which I'm aware). Clearly, that wasn't a major breakthrough in reuniting kidnapped children with their parents that endured.
I'm very cynical, but I've always thought that was a campaign to gather biometrics from the population using fear as a motivator. I don't necessarily think this is that, but I can't help wondering the perverse incentives of the FBI as I'm reminded of the ad.
I think the comment is pointing out that if your child is kidnapped and raised elsewhere, there will not be a reason to fingerprint them then for comparison unless there's already a reason to think they may have been kidnapped.
That is, it might help on the back end, but the comment is suggesting that mass fingerprinting is not likely to move the needle much.
A small chance is better than no chance. I was answering to the privacy concern, not the effectiveness of the method. It seems like a plausible business model to professionally collect hold biometric data encrypted with the owner's keys, opaque to the party storing the data.
It's a bit like the businesses that store umbilical cord stem cells for the very unlikely chance they'll be useful at some point in the future.
I think thier point was even if you registered your kids fingerprints with the police they are not going to go around to every kid in all the dinners checking fingerprints to compare to.
release what valuable information here? What information is being "released" that is going to be helpful in a way that if it wasn't for the FBI App, you would be regretting it?
This was a very big thing in the late 80s apparently. Our local Kiwanis Club had provided IDs for parents in the community who wanted them. They just had a photo of the child with some other physical descriptions like eye color and birthmarks. Still, kind of a local, analog version of this, but without the dystopian bent.
I agree, this feels more creepy than useful/helpful service.
There was a moral panic about kidnapped children in the '80s that resulted in parents getting their kids fingerprinted. The macabre side of it is that it wasn't for reuniting living kids... Very many children who can talk (i.e. 8 years old) would be able to describe their parents to the cops well enough to track them down from phone book data. It was really useful data for identifying John and Jane Doe corpses though.
Fingerprints aren't even particularly useful here.
Our irises are considerably more information-dense, accessible and stable over time as evidenced by the famous identification of Sharbat Gula: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jgd1000/afghan.html
A close-up photo should be enough to reliably identify a person years after they went missing.
As someone who wants to enter and profit from the burgeoning underground iris transplantation economy, where do I start? I get the sense that there is an arbitrage opportunity between the cost of eye surgery and crypto returns but exactly how do I capitalize on this?
Everest uses biometrics to tie your information to your wallet. The tech is actually pretty cool in my opinion - they have the Everest ID coin itself, but I am more interested in the identity management part of it.
I'm not sure I'm 100% on board, but the tech is really interesting and their approach to privacy seems much better than I would expect from an offering like that. The aim is to be able to offer Know Your Customer using their identity platform to a mulititude of services.
Yes - I used one as far back as in 2010 on a science fair where we enrolled people to a research database.
A phone camera close-up should be enough in the right conditions, but additionally Samsung's Galaxy line used to include and iris scanner, which was just a near-infrared LED and a camera.
While most people do have stable iris patterns it is not the case for everyone. Numerous conditions can cause changes in the eyes. Glaucoma being the most obvious one, but there are a whole host of other conditions like lisch nodules, Uveal melanoma, etc.
However, perhaps with training, identification could be made in spite of changes to the iris.
The algorithms used are pretty robust - your typical iris scan won't be done with a fully opened eye and there's also the question of eyelashes. Some examples:
Interesting link, thank you. Sorry for the late reply. The idea of wearing camouflaged contact lenses, and the work to defeat the attempt is interesting.
But your irises don't tend to leave traces everywhere, and are thus only valuable for telling who you are, not where you've been.
Although that depends on the number of cameras around, access to them, and how much they are recording. Fingerprints are a lot simpler and easier to access.
Happened to me as well. Now the FBI has my fingerprints on file even though I've never committed a crime.
I had a discussion with my Mom a couple years about this and she admitted she screwed up. I can't blame her of course. Especially since at the time there was plenty of FBI propoganda about missing kids terrifying parents and claiming this was a solution.
I think most states [edit: apparently only some states] in the US require a fingerprint in order to issue a drivers' license or for a state ID. So I guess you could be somewhat anonymous till you had to get your state ID and then they'd know who it was.
Well this sent me down a tangent since I had never heard of this. Per https://www.cga.ct.gov/2001/rpt/2001-R-0858.htm (circa 2001) the only states that require a fingerprint are California, Colorado, Georgia, Texas although apparently Alabama and Florida used to do so. Feels pretty crazy to me
IIRC, California just takes a thumbprint, so obviously don't use that thumb while committing crimes and you're fine. OTOH, I got the full set of fingerprints (in ink!) and affirmed an oath to uphold the constitutions of the US and California as a condition of working for a school district, so I'm not available for crimes anymore.
In the U.S. we used to collect palm/foot prints on every child within a few days of birth. Newborn fingerprints are difficult to collect, as skin is very delicate. Now we require DNA collection at birth.
With my youngest I found a clever way to "opt-out". Unfortunately at my child's 6 month pediatric appointment at a private clinic, the nurse charged in and demanded a sample to send in on the spot. She said they couldn't proceed with any services unless they sent the card in, as their license would be revoked unless doing so.
In my state you can REQUEST to have the collection card destroyed after 6 weeks, and before 18 years. But they do not guarantee it gets done. Which is just for the collection card. They make sure to "transfer but not sell" the samples to separate entity between that time, which keeps a copy and digitizes it.
This is bizarre and should not be legal. There is definitely not any public awareness of this practice.
Increasingly people are aware of the very real implications of allowing the government and insurance agencies to have your data. Your genes are your data
I remember reading about a country doing DNA collection of every single person born, since the 80s or something like that, leading to that country now sitting on the most extensive DNA database of its kind. I can't remember which country it was though. Searching for "most extensive DNA database" and similar just leads me to various voluntary databases from the US, but I think this database I'm thinking about was involuntary, and every single person in the country is basically registered in it.
California destroys the newborn's blood sample when the parents ask [0], but their privacy policy says that sometimes they don't do it [1]:
> You have a right to ask the Newborn Screening Program not to use or share your or your newborn’s information and/or specimen in the ways listed in this notice. However, we may not be able to comply with your request.
> I can't blame her of course. Especially since at the time there was plenty of FBI propoganda about missing kids terrifying parents and claiming this was a solution.
So long as we keep giving people a pass for falling for this crap they have no incentive not to fall for this crap.
Let's keep the blame on the government which is meant to serve us, not the people who were only doing what they thought was best after having been deceived by that same government.
Holding your mom accountable for a mistake she made when you were a baby isn't helping anyone, holding your government accountable for building a database of our DNA/fingerprints against our wishes helps everyone.
>Let's keep the blame on the government which is meant to serve us, not the people who were only doing what they thought was best after having been deceived by that same government.
At some point the people enable the government. People need to feel stupid for falling for that crap or they will keep falling for it.
>Holding your mom accountable for a mistake she made when you were a baby isn't helping anyone, holding your government accountable for building a database of our DNA/fingerprints against our wishes helps everyone.
This is not how it works.
If people cannot find the will to hold the people in their lives accountable then they will never find the will to hold the government accountable.
I'm not saying the dude has to pistol whip his mom and set the house on fire over it but it'd be nice if people would resent those kinds of decisions made by their parents and other people in their lives (like the aunt who submits her DNA to one of those ancestry services that shares it) a little more.
My parents were paranoid about kidnappings. It was like perfect social engineering on my parents' generation with TV movies like Adam - the story of John Walsh's son who was kidnapped and beheaded:
My parents had me and my siblings watch that movie with them - it is still unsettling to me thinking about it.
And then the FBI contacted my school and provided a voluntary program for parents to have their children fingerprinted. From my memory 95%+ of kids all lined up in my school and got fingerprinted to "protect them from kidnapping".
It honestly seems surreal - looking back it sure seems like a black ops campaign to get biometric data on a large portion of the U.S. youth population.
Or, they actually were thought to be useful for kidnappings and this was an honest attempt. Perhaps largely security theatre, I could imagine there have been a handful of cases where this was enough.
The ever growing mistrust in government and society will become a self fulfilling promise. I worry about our future when no good and honest talent wants to work for the greater good at reduced pay.
There is abundant evidence suggesting that arrow of causality between FBI activity and public perception of them as dastardly flows in the opposite direction from the one you have presumed here.
I got bonded (Police background checks with fingerprinting etc) for a job which had a large cash handling component. dealing with > 100K in twenties and fifties in a Casino. My prints were kept for elimination after the process, but the police were very eager to inform me that they don't get kept past two years.
The police had petitioned the government under the guise of privacy laws to make sure they had to throw away the records. Which seems counter intuitive until you realize it'd require me to go through the same process again at a later date.
More money for them.
I've less fear of my biometrics being tracked than I do of rent seeking behavior from public officials.
It also means they don't have to deal with the problem of having shit tons of fingerprint data. Depending on the laws around who was responsible for it, that could be quite a hassle.
I'm not sure that's relevant to this. This app just makes it easier to give police or security the information they ask for if you lose your child (note not necessarily kidnapped), like a photo, age, and height. And they claim the info is only stored locally. Maybe that claim is false, but if it was, then once that was discovered it would probably cause a lot of legal and PR problems for the FBI.
no need for any campaign anymore, most kids in EU have biometric passports, though not sure at what age they start fingerprinting them, which they don't do because their hands are growing too much so fingerprints world be quite useless under certain age
though some countries like Germany issue some simplified passports for kids, Czechia and Slovakia for instance issue same as adult passports, only difference being validity
I remember this! I got finger printed at some event where police had a booth next to the fire dept (who were espousing bike helmets and teaching kids how to properly wear one etc, actually useful safety info). It wasn't until I was a teenager when my first car was broken into and the speakers stolen that I realized how useless that endeavor must be. The officer who responded (my first time calling the police, not running from them!) was pretty upfront with me. As he took finger prints from the area where the door was jimmied, I was like "cool, finger printing!" and he told me this wouldn't likely lead to anything. First he said "You'll never get your speakers back, even if we found them we wouldn't call you, they'd probably be in a lot of all kinds of other stolen stuff and it's impossible to sort through and return stolen items." Bummer number one. Then he explained that the finger prints would only be useful if the thief got picked up for doing something else, he wasn't going to go run the prints and try to find the person etc like I was probably imagining (I was, I admit, thinking that's what happened when they took finger prints - thanks TV). Standing in my driveway I flashed back immediately to that finger printing booth where my parents were told it would help if I got kidnapped, and thought "Oh great, I'm in the system." Not that I had a life of crime in mind, but the internet of the early 90s really gave me a healthy distrust of being tracked, logged, etc. (Oh if we only knew the hellscape ahead.)
There's a science-fiction short story I've been trying to remember for quite some time.
I'd all but certainly read it in an anthology during the 1970s or early 1980s, probably one of the award compilations (Hugos, Analog, etc.).
A computer programmer and his boss are working on a large data tracking system that is about to be activated, in which everyone's identification and personal information are entered. The boss gives the programmer the choice of opting out of the system. The programmer opts out.
For the life of me I cannot remember the rest of the story, the author, year, etc. But it's stuck with me, and comes to mind often as a slew of ever-more-invasive online information systems (ISP email, some early LinkedIn-type start-ups, MySpace and Facebook, Google Gmail, Google+, etc.) have come on to the scene.
If anyone can remember what story this was, or others reasonably similar to it, I'd be grateful.
> "You'll never get your speakers back, even if we found them we wouldn't call you, they'd probably be in a lot of all kinds of other stolen stuff and it's impossible to sort through and return stolen items."
Wait what? So police simply keeps stolen goods with no option for the original owners to get them back? Because civil asset forfeiture isn't enough I guess?
A friend of mine noticed that the cameras at the bart stations were extremely hi-res a few years ago. He thought they could probably capture fingerprints with them.
I wonder what kinds of drive-by biometrics are really collected, especially when protecting children.
Cynically, it seems like a way to normalize an orwellian social credit system in the west where eventually everyone will have something similar on their phones, like China is doing.
"You already keep an app with photos, this just adds a barcode... "
The FBI is understaffed, misdirected & underfunded for its real mission, which I would argue must be fighting public corruption, organized crime and counter-espionage. Any objective analysis would conclude the Bureau has been politicized and its resources have been directed at operations, investigations and training that does not fulfill its core mission.
The bad PR and mistrust the FBI has earned in recent years is the public product of what I'm describing, and the solution is not mobile apps of marginal utility made to make the Bureau look good. No, the solution is arrests of corrupt politicians, crime bosses & spies.
Its not just the FBI suffering from feel/look good boondoggles. The Air Force struggles with hypersonics but excels at new uniform design. The DOT is a leader in equity & diversity, but has failed to upgrade & regulate rail infrastructure & procedures that make derailments a regular occurrence.
Tax revenues have been their highest in decades, possibly longer. We deserve better.
I think you are reading a lot into the development of an app. For anything the government does it seems like folks are ready to pop out and say, “the resources would be better spent on X.” Maybe true but I’d argue doing slightly wrong things is better than listening to the orchestra of naysayers and doing nothing.
I know it goes against majority of what people think on the subject, but sometimes doing nothing is the absolute best thing to do. Doing something badly at best can keep things as is; not to mention the worst case scenarios.
couldn't agree more - the things the FBI choses to spend time and money on are mind boggling; most egregious that comes to mind was all the wasted time and resources tracking down and recovering Tom Brady's jersey in Mexico - I don't care how much it was worth, Tom Brady or the Patriots each have hundreds of millions of dollars available to them if they wanted to track it down with their own money.
That's not "low grade" corruption. It's the plainest form of corruption conducted en masse and in a highly organized fashion. When an arm of the government can take your property without due process, any suspicion towards them is warranted.
With regards to this new app, I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes a way to tap into every phone in the country.
The simplest explanation for this really crappy, worthless app is that someone with budget wanted to give some overpriced FBI contract to a friend. I'm sure the FBI paid millions for this app when some college kid could do the same thing in a week.
The FBI and other 3 letter agencies have been vacuuming up every communication between us, warrantless, for so many years it’s crazy. That unconstitutional overreach has been used to do what exactly? No I really want to know. It’s not keeping us safe, because someone who is basically a cartoon caricature of a school shooter can scare everyone they come in contact with, get a long gun and ammo, and execute a mass shooting, but somehow the panopticon keeps missing it.
If we’re not giving up our rights for safety, what are we giving them up for? Cause we have neither.
> "That unconstitutional overreach has been used to do what exactly? No I really want to know. It’s not keeping us safe..."
Unpopular opinion, but you know the old saying: No one hears about the times the FBI, CIA, etc has stopped a terrorist act, you only hear about the disasters that eventually played out.
For every one sick person that went on to do something crazy, hundreds have been caught before anything happened.
I don't understand the upset for "warrantless wire-tapping" unless you have something to hide, especially when these days people are begging the government to protect us from extremists/terrorists and not sit on their hands.
>I don't understand the upset for "warrantless wire-tapping" unless you have something to hide, especially when these days people are begging the government to protect us from extremists/terrorists and not sit on their hands.
Okay. Let's assume for the moment that you "have nothing to hide."
Let's go to your house and set up cameras and microphones covering the premises.
Then, let's do the same for your automobile(s).
And for good measure, let's have you wear a microphone 24/7 too.
Once that's done, we can set up a website where we can all watch/listen to you.
If you have nothing to hide, that should be no big deal, right?
What's that? You don't consent to such monitoring? Why? Do you have something to hide?
> "Once that's done, we can set up a website where we can all watch/listen to you... What's that? You don't consent to such monitoring?"
Having a system for counter-terrorism agencies to check phone logs for keywords is vastly different from setting up cameras in everyones houses for the world to see. I'm not even sure how anyone would think that's remotely similar.
> No one hears about the times the FBI, CIA, etc has stopped a terrorist act
We should be hearing about them, if they actually exist, especially with how rabid the media is in reporting any potential terrorism stories[1]. A policy of not just quietly "disappearing" people is supposedly what sets us apart from those authoritarian countries that the US likes to paint as boogeymen. If what you're saying was true, it'd be a horrifying breach of ethics and the literal constitutional right to due process.
"We did a gang wiretap... where we listened to social media apps... where we listened to cell phones and their communications... In total, 41 suspects are facing charges..."
That's what I'm talking about. Suspects being monitored. Even if there's not a court warrant for such individuals, I'd be happy with the LEO using any means to catch criminals involved in sex trafficking, murder, etc.
From unflattering dress blues to incredibly uncomfortably and noisy (yes, noisy as in creates loud sounds) workout clothes, Air Force uniform design is terrible in my experience and subjectively seems to be the worst of all the services (I was always envious of Navy PT gear, looked a lot better than ours).
The FBI's primary objective in practice seems to have always been "maintaining the existing social and political order" [1], with some swaying justification of national security and preventing violence, corruption, espionage, terrorism, cyber attacks, and other vague, broad, non-specific, topical threats.
I've read letters from NKVD agents located in the USA in the 1930s talking about how this new guy J Edgar Hoover is using political blackmail so effectively. They were reporting back to the USSR telling their superiors how political blackmail was something that the new USSR needed to perfect and use to its advantage.
I think we can have a long discussion about what the real purpose of the FBI is. And I bet even within the FBI they can have this long discussion. It is many purposed, some of which we may determine to be pro-social, or pro-democratic. While others are probably more anti-social and anti-democratic.
The first FBI director had Washington by the balls for forty years. Nixon didn't fire him because he expected him to retaliate with blackmail, neither did Truman or Kennedy.
When one learns about who controlled him and how they are on the road to real understanding of the FBI in history. (Hint: Trumps former mentor was involved!) Unfortunately, in my analysis of the various 3-letters, they are so compartmentalized that the top-down corruption is not seen by the generally good intentioned middle and lower men. So the bureaucratic momentum keeps the agencies preserved when in reality they are often the most egregious violators of the constitution and need to be reigned in.
"The connections Roy Cohn built during the 1950s made him a well-known public figure and translated into great political influence that peaked during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Yet, as Cohn built his public image, he was also developing a dark private life, which would come to be dominated by the same blackmail pedophile racket that appears to have first begun with Lewis Rosenstiel.
One of the “blackmail parties” Susan Kaufman attended with her then-husband Lewis Rosenstiel was hosted by Cohn in 1958 at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, suite 233. Kaufman described Cohn’s suite as a “beautiful suite…all done in light blue.” She described being introduced to Hoover, who was in drag, by Cohn, who told her that Hoover’s name was “Mary” in a fit of barely concealed laughter. Kaufman testified that young boys were present and Kaufman claimed that Cohn, Hoover and her ex-husband engaged in sexual activity with these minors.
New York attorney John Klotz, tasked with investigating Cohn for a case well after Kaufman’s testimony, also found evidence of the “blue suite” at the Plaza Hotel and its role in a sex extortion ring after combing through local government documents and information gathered by private detectives. Klotz later told journalist and author Burton Hersh what he had learned:
Roy Cohn was providing protection. There were a bunch of pedophiles involved. That’s where Cohn got his power from — blackmail.”
Perhaps the most damning confirmation of Cohn’s activities in Suite 233 comes from statements made by Cohn himself to former NYPD detective and ex-head of the department’s Human-Trafficking and Vice-Related Crimes Division, James Rothstein. Rothstein later told John DeCamp — a former Nebraska state senator who investigated a government-connected child sex ring based in Omaha — among other investigators, that Cohn had admitted to being part of a sexual blackmail operation targeting politicians with child prostitutes during a sit-down interview with the former detective.
Rothstein told DeCamp the following about Cohn:
Cohn’s job was to run the little boys. Say you had an admiral, a general, a congressman, who did not want to go along with the program. Cohn’s job was to set them up, then they would go along. Cohn told me that himself.”
Rothstein later told Paul David Collins, a former journalist turned researcher, that Cohn had also identified this sexual blackmail operation as being part of the anti-communist crusade of the time.
The fact that Cohn, per Rothstein’s recollection, stated that the child sex blackmail ring was part of the government-sponsored anti-communist crusade suggests that elements of the government, including Hoover’s FBI, may have been connected at a much broader level than Hoover’s own personal involvement, as the FBI closely coordinated with McCarthy and Cohn for much of the red scare."
Ironically this could well be a brilliant counter intelligence post pretending to be as stupid as it sounds.
What better way to make sure the FBI keeps removing people's freedom than by making it a partisan issue?
Trump, born in 1943, was responsible for Hoovers cache of compromat. A word that entered the Russian lexicon because the KGB was so impressed by what he was doing in Washington in the 1930s.
Merely mentioning Trump doesnt make the post partisan at all. On the contrary, I think its obvious compromise operations target everyone, in both parties (and business, etc) So Im not sure what you are getting at. Seems like you are strawmanning (things I didnt say) unless Im misunderstanding your point.
Is there any evidence that the word has entered the Russian lexicon from English? The Russian "компромат" feels like a straightforward contraction of "компрометирующие материалы", following the same pattern as many other Soviet neologisms like "нарком" or "комбед".
>Kompromat refers to materials collected specifically for the purpose of blackmailing the target. It’s a Russian portmanteau of komprometiruyushchiy, “compromising,” and material, “material,” and if those Russian words look familiar, it’s because they are; they were borrowed into Russian from English.
The sheer stupidity of two nations borrowing a word from the other to sound smarter and more worldly ought to blow your mind. But it happens so often that anyone who is polylingual just has to deal with it.
The worst example is Latinx. Americans who wanted to cosmopolitan in the 90s decided that Latin wasn't good enough since everyone knew what Latin meant. So they started saying Latino instead. With the 10s craze of gender neutrality Latino was now problematic so it was changed to Latinx only in the way someone who has never passed high school Spanish could. Now instead of the English word Latin we have the abomination Latinx being forced on Spanish speakers by English speakers in the name of progress.
Merriam-Webster is certainly not a reliable source when it comes to etymology of non-English words.
I'm Russian myself, and I find it extremely dubious that either of the constituent parts of the word was borrowed into Russian from English. Russian Wiktionary gives 1720 for the first known use of "материал" (material), and illustrates "компрометирующий" (compromising) with a Dostoyevsky quote from 1846. Both predate the time when English was the primary source of borrowings, so they're far more likely to have been borrowed from French or German.
This M-W article is wrong about other things, too - e.g. "пропаганда" (propaganda) is from German.
I think a lot of people are put off by the fact that the FBI took the time to make this instead of doing more important duties. The app seems to have good intentions, but its execution needs work, so there's not much benefit.
> The FBI is not collecting or storing any photos or information that you enter in the app. All data resides solely on your mobile device unless you need to send it to authorities.
> All data resides solely on your mobile device unless you need to send it to authorities.
Network chatter can be viewed without source code access. If what they’re saying is true, this app should not make network requests unless initiated by the user.
This is a good point. Still, apps generally get updated frequently. So they could change it at any time, which is why it would be nice if others could audit it at any time.
What's the point if you can't verify what they upload to play store / app store anyway? They can publish as code anything but that doesn't mean you run it.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 275 ms ] threadhttps://mobile.twitter.com/search?q=elementary%20(fingerprin...
This is like taking a DNA sample from child when they're born nowadays, it seems harmless now, but we can already see companies using this kind of data maliciously.
The point was that if your child goes missing, you have their fingerprints available so they can be used in investigations. In our case, the fingerprints were given to us to take home in case they were ever needed. At the time I didn't think to ask if the police kept a record for themselves, but I doubt it (just because local PD wasn't very organized).
See also ECAP: https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/ecap
Is this weasel words? Apple already has some terms about being able to scan things locally before "potential upload", no?
But what if an Apple employee works for the FBI? Large firms are known to have moles in them, both from competitors, and from government.
* if packets are only sent via carrier, not wifi
* if packets are sent to aws instances, which is very common
* if it all stops when phone is rooted, which is common for many apps
* Gov't is mandated to use AWS Gov instances which are quite easy to distinguish [2].
* there are ways to bypass those rootchecks to make a rooted phone seem not rooted [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection#United_...
[2] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/aws-govcloud-earns-dod...
[3] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68661134/root-detection-...
Consider that they wouldn't have to tell us, indeed, might face criminal penalties for disclosing it.
Conclusion: the FBI can do this.
That's not, in fact, true. The certifications that apply to AWS Gov make it easier to meet certain government compliance rules that apply to certain categories of data, but it is possible to meet the standards on a platform that isn't certified or certified to a lower level (but it means more administrative work for the org using the platform) and many Commercial AWS offerings have FedRAMP certifications, anyhow. I work in an org touched by FedRAMP, and which is almost entirely on AWS commercial, not Gov.
In the case of a child disappearing, it could save a lot of time.
/tinfoil
1. This plays into the US's helicopter parenting culture of fear
2. Most kidnappings are by someone you already know. The "shopping at the mall" example is again, more fear mongering
https://journalistsresource.org/politics-and-government/chil...
> Parents were the perpetrators in more than 90 percent of kidnappings and abductions
3. The app is to store photos of your kid? Just use your camera gallery. I guarantee it's easier to use than the FBI's clunky app (inferred from their screenshot of a 10-year-old iOS version)
4. This is life, you can't solve everything with an app. Get your head out of your phone and open your eyes and look for your kid, they're probably one store down at the arcade
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62047223
So how does this app help?
There is some class of people out there who don't understand or aren't capable and the government is acting as a gap filler.
Every 40 seconds, a child goes missing or is abducted in the United States. Approximately 840,000 children are reported missing each year. having access to rapid id/photo. Minutes are precious. I'm no expert but + for fbi, minus for the cynics. Just my 2 cents
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/most-kidnapped-childr...
> But contrary to the dominant narrative, nearly all child abductions are perpetrated by family members. Stranger abductions — certainly alarming and tragic — actually occur with “lightning-strike rarity,” as a report in the journal Criminal Justice Studies put it, in contrast to the more than 200,000 parental abductions committed each year that meet the criminal criteria and are not merely delayed visitations or misunderstandings.
And the 840k number massively overstates actual active cases; reports can be solved in a matter of minutes/hours, like a lost kid at an amusement park.
https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-us-missing/fact-ch...
> Therefore, of the 365,348 missing children (between the age of 0 and 17) reports recorded in 2020, only 30,396 – or about 8% – were still active cases at the end of the year.
(Good luck explaining that to a QAnoner, though.)
2) Preventing divorce in the first place certainly is.
Via which specific policies?
Simply bemoaning "urban" people's "broken families" doesn't count, and they might start with their favorite President's marriages.
A LOT of problems are caused by a lack of at least one parent/parental role.
My brother won't return his shopping cart to the shopping cart return area because, in those 30 seconds where his back is turned, someone is likely to take his children. One parent told me they take it one step further and they won't use passenger door to put their children in the car. Instead, they reach through the car from the driver's door. This way they don't have to walk around the car which would allow someone to take their child.
I've suggested just locking the children in the car but it seems like solving the wrong problem, really.
This is borderline mental illness.
We're sorry... The request has been blocked.
https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/child-id-app-brochure.pd...
Thanks for answering the question we all had, FBI.
The UI needs a lot of work going by the screenshots, it doesn't look appealing and there's some obvious contrast issues
In adulthood, I've often thought back to that ludicrous ad. No child's fingerprints are getting checked unless some foul play is already suspected. The likelihood that the child would fall into police custody and get checked is already slim; fingerprints aren't going to help until that happens. We don't have campaigns to fingerprint children as a proactive precaution today (of which I'm aware). Clearly, that wasn't a major breakthrough in reuniting kidnapped children with their parents that endured.
I'm very cynical, but I've always thought that was a campaign to gather biometrics from the population using fear as a motivator. I don't necessarily think this is that, but I can't help wondering the perverse incentives of the FBI as I'm reminded of the ad.
A simple way around it is to have the kid fingerprinted and only release the information if the kid needs to be tracked/located.
That is, it might help on the back end, but the comment is suggesting that mass fingerprinting is not likely to move the needle much.
It's a bit like the businesses that store umbilical cord stem cells for the very unlikely chance they'll be useful at some point in the future.
I agree, this feels more creepy than useful/helpful service.
Our irises are considerably more information-dense, accessible and stable over time as evidenced by the famous identification of Sharbat Gula: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jgd1000/afghan.html
A close-up photo should be enough to reliably identify a person years after they went missing.
Someone should give you free cryptocurrency for a scan of your iris.
I'm not sure I'm 100% on board, but the tech is really interesting and their approach to privacy seems much better than I would expect from an offering like that. The aim is to be able to offer Know Your Customer using their identity platform to a mulititude of services.
Everest.org is their site
Fingerprints can also be left on objects, which can be helpful for tracking someone.
Yes - I used one as far back as in 2010 on a science fair where we enrolled people to a research database.
A phone camera close-up should be enough in the right conditions, but additionally Samsung's Galaxy line used to include and iris scanner, which was just a near-infrared LED and a camera.
https://www.wired.com/2010/09/afghan-biometric-dragnet-could...
Of course, the Taliban were able to seize this collection of data.
https://theintercept.com/2021/08/17/afghanistan-taliban-mili...
However, perhaps with training, identification could be made in spite of changes to the iris.
https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-outline-boundaries-s...
Although that depends on the number of cameras around, access to them, and how much they are recording. Fingerprints are a lot simpler and easier to access.
I had a discussion with my Mom a couple years about this and she admitted she screwed up. I can't blame her of course. Especially since at the time there was plenty of FBI propoganda about missing kids terrifying parents and claiming this was a solution.
https://www.aclu.org/other/newborn-dna-banking
With my youngest I found a clever way to "opt-out". Unfortunately at my child's 6 month pediatric appointment at a private clinic, the nurse charged in and demanded a sample to send in on the spot. She said they couldn't proceed with any services unless they sent the card in, as their license would be revoked unless doing so.
https://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/02/04/baby.dna.government/in...
In my state you can REQUEST to have the collection card destroyed after 6 weeks, and before 18 years. But they do not guarantee it gets done. Which is just for the collection card. They make sure to "transfer but not sell" the samples to separate entity between that time, which keeps a copy and digitizes it.
> You have a right to ask the Newborn Screening Program not to use or share your or your newborn’s information and/or specimen in the ways listed in this notice. However, we may not be able to comply with your request.
[0] https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CFH/DGDS/Pages/nbs/MyBabysB...
[1] https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CFH/DGDS/Pages/nbs/nbsnpp.a...
So long as we keep giving people a pass for falling for this crap they have no incentive not to fall for this crap.
Holding your mom accountable for a mistake she made when you were a baby isn't helping anyone, holding your government accountable for building a database of our DNA/fingerprints against our wishes helps everyone.
At some point the people enable the government. People need to feel stupid for falling for that crap or they will keep falling for it.
>Holding your mom accountable for a mistake she made when you were a baby isn't helping anyone, holding your government accountable for building a database of our DNA/fingerprints against our wishes helps everyone.
This is not how it works.
If people cannot find the will to hold the people in their lives accountable then they will never find the will to hold the government accountable.
I'm not saying the dude has to pistol whip his mom and set the house on fire over it but it'd be nice if people would resent those kinds of decisions made by their parents and other people in their lives (like the aunt who submits her DNA to one of those ancestry services that shares it) a little more.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085136/
My parents had me and my siblings watch that movie with them - it is still unsettling to me thinking about it.
And then the FBI contacted my school and provided a voluntary program for parents to have their children fingerprinted. From my memory 95%+ of kids all lined up in my school and got fingerprinted to "protect them from kidnapping".
It honestly seems surreal - looking back it sure seems like a black ops campaign to get biometric data on a large portion of the U.S. youth population.
The ever growing mistrust in government and society will become a self fulfilling promise. I worry about our future when no good and honest talent wants to work for the greater good at reduced pay.
The police had petitioned the government under the guise of privacy laws to make sure they had to throw away the records. Which seems counter intuitive until you realize it'd require me to go through the same process again at a later date. More money for them.
I've less fear of my biometrics being tracked than I do of rent seeking behavior from public officials.
though some countries like Germany issue some simplified passports for kids, Czechia and Slovakia for instance issue same as adult passports, only difference being validity
I'd all but certainly read it in an anthology during the 1970s or early 1980s, probably one of the award compilations (Hugos, Analog, etc.).
A computer programmer and his boss are working on a large data tracking system that is about to be activated, in which everyone's identification and personal information are entered. The boss gives the programmer the choice of opting out of the system. The programmer opts out.
For the life of me I cannot remember the rest of the story, the author, year, etc. But it's stuck with me, and comes to mind often as a slew of ever-more-invasive online information systems (ISP email, some early LinkedIn-type start-ups, MySpace and Facebook, Google Gmail, Google+, etc.) have come on to the scene.
If anyone can remember what story this was, or others reasonably similar to it, I'd be grateful.
(There may well have been others.)
Wait what? So police simply keeps stolen goods with no option for the original owners to get them back? Because civil asset forfeiture isn't enough I guess?
They auction them off and use the profits to buy tanks and grenade launchers.
I wonder what kinds of drive-by biometrics are really collected, especially when protecting children.
Seems like an app to fix a nonexistent problem.
"You already keep an app with photos, this just adds a barcode... "
The FBI is understaffed, misdirected & underfunded for its real mission, which I would argue must be fighting public corruption, organized crime and counter-espionage. Any objective analysis would conclude the Bureau has been politicized and its resources have been directed at operations, investigations and training that does not fulfill its core mission.
The bad PR and mistrust the FBI has earned in recent years is the public product of what I'm describing, and the solution is not mobile apps of marginal utility made to make the Bureau look good. No, the solution is arrests of corrupt politicians, crime bosses & spies.
Its not just the FBI suffering from feel/look good boondoggles. The Air Force struggles with hypersonics but excels at new uniform design. The DOT is a leader in equity & diversity, but has failed to upgrade & regulate rail infrastructure & procedures that make derailments a regular occurrence.
Tax revenues have been their highest in decades, possibly longer. We deserve better.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-06-09/fbi-beve...
That's not "low grade" corruption. It's the plainest form of corruption conducted en masse and in a highly organized fashion. When an arm of the government can take your property without due process, any suspicion towards them is warranted.
With regards to this new app, I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes a way to tap into every phone in the country.
If we’re not giving up our rights for safety, what are we giving them up for? Cause we have neither.
Unpopular opinion, but you know the old saying: No one hears about the times the FBI, CIA, etc has stopped a terrorist act, you only hear about the disasters that eventually played out.
For every one sick person that went on to do something crazy, hundreds have been caught before anything happened.
I don't understand the upset for "warrantless wire-tapping" unless you have something to hide, especially when these days people are begging the government to protect us from extremists/terrorists and not sit on their hands.
If their dragnets had even a shred of utility for that purpose they'd be telling you about it at every opportunity.
"500 murdered in a terrorist attack"
versus:
"We caught some bad guys" [who potentially could've killed more]
Okay. Let's assume for the moment that you "have nothing to hide."
Let's go to your house and set up cameras and microphones covering the premises.
Then, let's do the same for your automobile(s).
And for good measure, let's have you wear a microphone 24/7 too.
Once that's done, we can set up a website where we can all watch/listen to you.
If you have nothing to hide, that should be no big deal, right?
What's that? You don't consent to such monitoring? Why? Do you have something to hide?
Having a system for counter-terrorism agencies to check phone logs for keywords is vastly different from setting up cameras in everyones houses for the world to see. I'm not even sure how anyone would think that's remotely similar.
We should be hearing about them, if they actually exist, especially with how rabid the media is in reporting any potential terrorism stories[1]. A policy of not just quietly "disappearing" people is supposedly what sets us apart from those authoritarian countries that the US likes to paint as boogeymen. If what you're saying was true, it'd be a horrifying breach of ethics and the literal constitutional right to due process.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...
I'm curious. What are the other differences in the parallel universe you come from? Does boot leather taste like strawberry shortcake?
Mass surveillance is not improving general safety.
And if you don't understand the upset for having some stranger rife through your private data, may I have a full dump of your email inbox?
[citation needed]
You are going to get flagged to death. Rightfully so.
https://www.fox13news.com/news/41-arrested-in-racketeering-i...
"We did a gang wiretap... where we listened to social media apps... where we listened to cell phones and their communications... In total, 41 suspects are facing charges..."
That's what I'm talking about. Suspects being monitored. Even if there's not a court warrant for such individuals, I'd be happy with the LEO using any means to catch criminals involved in sex trafficking, murder, etc.
From unflattering dress blues to incredibly uncomfortably and noisy (yes, noisy as in creates loud sounds) workout clothes, Air Force uniform design is terrible in my experience and subjectively seems to be the worst of all the services (I was always envious of Navy PT gear, looked a lot better than ours).
The FBI's primary objective in practice seems to have always been "maintaining the existing social and political order" [1], with some swaying justification of national security and preventing violence, corruption, espionage, terrorism, cyber attacks, and other vague, broad, non-specific, topical threats.
1. https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/9475...
> mistrust the FBI has earned in recent years
Do you consider COINTELPRO–BLACK HATE recent?
https://archive.org/details/FBI-COINTELPRO-BLACK/100-HQ-4480...
I think we can have a long discussion about what the real purpose of the FBI is. And I bet even within the FBI they can have this long discussion. It is many purposed, some of which we may determine to be pro-social, or pro-democratic. While others are probably more anti-social and anti-democratic.
The FBI is working as intended.
https://www.mintpressnews.com/shocking-origins-jeffrey-epste...
"The connections Roy Cohn built during the 1950s made him a well-known public figure and translated into great political influence that peaked during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Yet, as Cohn built his public image, he was also developing a dark private life, which would come to be dominated by the same blackmail pedophile racket that appears to have first begun with Lewis Rosenstiel.
One of the “blackmail parties” Susan Kaufman attended with her then-husband Lewis Rosenstiel was hosted by Cohn in 1958 at Manhattan’s Plaza Hotel, suite 233. Kaufman described Cohn’s suite as a “beautiful suite…all done in light blue.” She described being introduced to Hoover, who was in drag, by Cohn, who told her that Hoover’s name was “Mary” in a fit of barely concealed laughter. Kaufman testified that young boys were present and Kaufman claimed that Cohn, Hoover and her ex-husband engaged in sexual activity with these minors.
New York attorney John Klotz, tasked with investigating Cohn for a case well after Kaufman’s testimony, also found evidence of the “blue suite” at the Plaza Hotel and its role in a sex extortion ring after combing through local government documents and information gathered by private detectives. Klotz later told journalist and author Burton Hersh what he had learned:
Perhaps the most damning confirmation of Cohn’s activities in Suite 233 comes from statements made by Cohn himself to former NYPD detective and ex-head of the department’s Human-Trafficking and Vice-Related Crimes Division, James Rothstein. Rothstein later told John DeCamp — a former Nebraska state senator who investigated a government-connected child sex ring based in Omaha — among other investigators, that Cohn had admitted to being part of a sexual blackmail operation targeting politicians with child prostitutes during a sit-down interview with the former detective.Rothstein told DeCamp the following about Cohn:
Rothstein later told Paul David Collins, a former journalist turned researcher, that Cohn had also identified this sexual blackmail operation as being part of the anti-communist crusade of the time.The fact that Cohn, per Rothstein’s recollection, stated that the child sex blackmail ring was part of the government-sponsored anti-communist crusade suggests that elements of the government, including Hoover’s FBI, may have been connected at a much broader level than Hoover’s own personal involvement, as the FBI closely coordinated with McCarthy and Cohn for much of the red scare."
What better way to make sure the FBI keeps removing people's freedom than by making it a partisan issue?
Trump, born in 1943, was responsible for Hoovers cache of compromat. A word that entered the Russian lexicon because the KGB was so impressed by what he was doing in Washington in the 1930s.
>Kompromat refers to materials collected specifically for the purpose of blackmailing the target. It’s a Russian portmanteau of komprometiruyushchiy, “compromising,” and material, “material,” and if those Russian words look familiar, it’s because they are; they were borrowed into Russian from English.
The sheer stupidity of two nations borrowing a word from the other to sound smarter and more worldly ought to blow your mind. But it happens so often that anyone who is polylingual just has to deal with it.
The worst example is Latinx. Americans who wanted to cosmopolitan in the 90s decided that Latin wasn't good enough since everyone knew what Latin meant. So they started saying Latino instead. With the 10s craze of gender neutrality Latino was now problematic so it was changed to Latinx only in the way someone who has never passed high school Spanish could. Now instead of the English word Latin we have the abomination Latinx being forced on Spanish speakers by English speakers in the name of progress.
I'm Russian myself, and I find it extremely dubious that either of the constituent parts of the word was borrowed into Russian from English. Russian Wiktionary gives 1720 for the first known use of "материал" (material), and illustrates "компрометирующий" (compromising) with a Dostoyevsky quote from 1846. Both predate the time when English was the primary source of borrowings, so they're far more likely to have been borrowed from French or German.
This M-W article is wrong about other things, too - e.g. "пропаганда" (propaganda) is from German.
If true, this sounds thoughtfully designed.
Network chatter can be viewed without source code access. If what they’re saying is true, this app should not make network requests unless initiated by the user.
Mulder: They must have a mole inside the Bureau!
Skinner: If you go down this road I can't protect you.
Smoking man: smokes