Official Identity Theft

Frances Madeson

May 22, 2007

Frances Madeson is the author of a new comic novel, Cooperative Village, which chronicles the travails of a woman who becomes subject to the USA PATRIOT Act when her library card goes astray. More information is at the publisher’s website, www.carolmrp.com.

Thanks to Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine’s March 9 audit report detailing the FBI’s handling of expanded surveillance powers granted under the USA PATRIOT Act, subsequent media reports, and congressional hearings called to probe the findings, we now know that the FBI’s been doing the same “heckuva job” with respect to information gathering and storage characteristic of other sectors of the Bush administration.

Though the toothpaste is out of the tube, I wonder if people generally grasp the enormity of the damage done. There is in existence an electronic database with over a half-billion records, containing information collected via extrajudicial requests made in National Security Letters, the majority of which pertain to U.S. citizens. Your banking and credit activities, telephone and internet usage records, insurance policies, post office box rental, car, boat and home ownership records could already be in the FBI’s Investigative Data Warehouse. If so, no one need inform you. If the information is incorrect, there’s no way to fix it. It is shared among 10,000 government employees at multiple agencies, and is stored for 20 years even if you have no connection whatsoever to a crime. In fact, only 65 convictions correlated to information obtained by the FBI from over 143,000 NSL demands made during 2003-2005.