How to find out what the government knows about you

I wrote this article several years ago for 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. With the NSA spying on everyone being in the news recently, I figured I would revive this old guide and post it to the Internet for all to see. I also know that I’m effectively outing myself as the author of this piece as it appeared in 2600. No big deal. My nom de Hacker is the same as the name I use on every other website. I’m sure the NSA figured that out when they came across my Facebook page a few years ago.

Onward, to the article…

First off, this article assumes that you are a dude or dudette living in the United States who wants to know what the US Government knows about you. This is actually a pretty easy endeavor, it is not, however, quick. It involves snail mail and is guaranteed to take at least three months to receive any results.

Why you want to know what the government knows about you is your own business. However, if you know that you have done something that could get you arrested if they knew where you are, you might not want to proceed. Also, this is not a primer on how to get your brother’s records, or your mother’s, or your great-grandfather’s, who you believe worked for Al Capone.

There’s also that rumor that if you ask the FBI to send you a copy of your file and they find you don’t have one, they start one on you right then because if you’re asking for a copy of your file, you must be doing something that necessitates them having a file on you. It’s like the one where if you buy a copy of 2600 the ever-present “they” start tracking you. I’m starting to wonder what happens when you write for 2600.

First, who do you think has a file on you? I’m talking about those (typically) three-letter-organizations, the FBI, NSA, CIA, DHS, etc. Since it’s so easy to write one letter and change it slightly for each organization, why not send a letter to all of them. Remember, the price of a stamp is currently 44 cents. The price is set to go up to 46 cents in January.

There are two Acts at work here. First there is the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), was signed into law by President Johnson in 1966. It is a law that promotes openness in government and allows members of the public to request documents from the various governmental entities. The second Act is the Privacy Act of 1974. This Act governs the collection, maintenance, use, and dissemination of personally identifiable information about individuals that is maintained in systems of records by federal agencies. The Privacy Act also prohibits the disclosure of information from a system of records without the written consent of the subject individual.

In order to obtain any documents about yourself, you have to invoke both Acts in a letter to each organization you wish to contact about your records.

In your letter to each organization, it would help to follow proper letter writing protocols. That way whoever receives your letter will have an easier time reading it and figuring out what you want. The scope of this article does not include teaching you how to write a letter. If you would like a refresher course on how to write a letter, then type “proper letter writing format” into your search engine of choice. However, the CIA has a great sample FOIA/PA letter online at http://www.foia.cia.gov/sample_request_letter.asp.

Now that you are ready to write your letter, it should contain the following information: That you are seeking any records that organization has about you, make sure to explain that you are invoking both FOIA and the Privacy Act, your full name, any alias you may have used (if your name is William, but people call you Bill, this would fit, as would any screen name or “hacker name” you use or have used), date of birth, where you were born, social security number, phone number, current address, a fee you are willing to pay for this service (I recommend $25), note, that you do not have to send this money in unless they ask for it, and if they do ask for it, it means they must have quite a bit of files to send you. I have requested files from FOIA from several government organizations and none of them have ever charged me for the files they sent, though they did inform me that more information is available, at a price.

The Secret Service’s FOIA page states that you need to sign you letter and have a notary witness it or affix the following to your letter: “I declare under penalty of perjury that the foregoing is true and correct. Executed on [date].” You should also include a copy of your drivers license or other identification so that they can compare your actual identification to the information you have provided (and your signature on your license to the signature on your letter).

Now that your letter is written, below are the addresses of the various governmental agencies you may want to try contacting. I am only giving the address to the main FBI location, not the branch offices. You may want to check the FBI’s website to find out the nearest branch office to you and appeal to them as well. These are just a few of the organizations you can contact about records. If you were ever in the military there is a slew of resources online available to help you figure out where to send your inquiry as to your military records.

Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)

Freedom of Information Operations Unit (SARO)
Drug Enforcement Administration
700 Army Navy Drive
Arlington, VA 22202

Secret Service

Communications Center (FOI/PA)
245 Murray Lane
Building T-5
Washington, D.C. 20223

Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

FOIA/PA
The Privacy Office
U.S. Department of Homeland Security
245 Murray Drive SW
STOP-0655
Washington, D.C. 20528-0655

Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

Federal Bureau of Investigation
Attn: FOI/PA Request
Record/Information Dissemination Section
170 Marcel Drive
Winchester, VA 22602-4843

National Security Agency

National Security Agency
Attn: FOIA/PA Office (DJP4)
9800 Savage Road, Suite 6248
Ft. George G. Meade, MD 20755-6248

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)

Information and Privacy Coordinator
Central Intelligence Agency
Washington, D.C. 20505

INTERPOL (USNCB)

Office of the General Counsel
INTERPOL-U.S. National Central Bureau
Department of Justice
Washington, D.C. 20530-0001

Defense Intelligence Agency

Defense Intelligence Agency
ATTN:  DAN-1A (FOIA)
200 MacDill Blvd
Washington, DC 20340-5100

Odds are that you should only try contacting agencies you believe would have information on you. If you’ve never robbed a bank or tried to kill a President, you might not want to bother the Secret Service. But, even if you haven’t, why send them a letter anyway, you never know what you’ll find.

Quotes Every Man Should Know

“Over the past few years,” I thought while typing this review. “I have reviewed many books. One thing I have never reviewed, though, is a book of quotations.”

“How do you review a book of quotations?” I asked myself. “Even if there’s two or three quotations you don’t care about, there’s bound to be many more that you do.”

Well, as Bruce Lee says on page 42, “Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.”

“That gave me an idea, how about using quotes to review a book of quotes? As Julio Cortázar said, ‘In quoting others, we cite ourselves.’”

“A good day is one where I can not just read a book, but write a review of it. Maybe today I’ll be able to do that. I get for some reason somewhat stronger when the sun starts to go down. Dusk is a good time for me. I’m crepuscular.” ~ Christopher Hitchens

“Two thumbs up.” ~ Roger Ebert

“Books serve to show a man that those original thoughts of his aren’t very new at all.” ~ Abraham Lincoln

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” ~ Ray Bradbury

“Books of quotations are always a fun read. Old quotes are like tweets before Twitter. ~ Bradley Hall

http://quirkbooks.com/book/quotes-every-man-should-know

Back To Work

I recently went to a massive book sale. Over the course of the Summer, the books I obtained that day (and a few others) will be reviewed here.

The first book to be reviewed is this book, Back to Work by former US President, Bill Clinton.

It’s pretty short at around 200 pages.

Inside, Mr. Clinton talks about how great the country was when he was President and that we were on track to pay off the national debt in the foreseeable future.

Then during the eight years after he left office, something happened, and that isn’t going to happen anymore. He’s not blaming anyone, things happen. But, he’s got a plan.

Mr. Clinton has a few items that, if the country does them, will come out of the recession and be back on top soon. Of course, Mr. Clinton is a realist. He knows that the country isn’t going to do everything he’s asking, and he can’t run for a third term. But, just putting the ideas out there he calls on the citizens of this nation to help get these programs and other ideas started. Whether by fronting the money for an XPRIZE-like thing, or possibly talking to your senator or congressman or governor (or President).

All of the ideas he lists are feasible and could quickly put people back to work, which is one thing sorely needed in this country. Quite a few of his ideas are about clean energy initiatives. Whether you believe in global warming or not, clean energy would definitely be a good thing for the planet. If we can build sustainable hydro-electric plants, wind power turbines, and solar panels, and figure out a way to power cars and things with them, we could cut our dependence on foreign oil.

In the end, this was a great book. I liked Mr. Clinton more after reading it.

One plan I’ve always thought that would increase jobs would be to digitize the national archives. It would put many people to work in nearly every state, and, because digital archives are easily saved and copied, we could have a safety net against fire, which is paper’s greatest enemy. Even if one archives place burned down, as long as we have those archives saved digitally, we’d still have those archives.

The Resurrectionist

The Resurrectionist, by E.B. Hudspeth, is a false document. That is, a story claims to be a biography of fictional character. In this case, Dr. Spencer Black.

Dr. Black’s father was a famous resurrectionist, that is, grave robber. He and his sons would venture to fresh graves and dig up corpses for use in anatomy lessons and such.

With time, the young Spencer Black would engage on his own medical career in the late 1800s. At first he became famous for fixing anomalies and birth defects. But, soon, he started thinking that some of these abnormalities were latent genetical traits trying to come back to the surface. For example, the doctor believed that a person that was born without arms was made that way because their body was trying to grow wings.

He then tries to create fantastical creatures by grafting pieces of existing creatures together and shows them off in an entirely macbre travelling show.

While fiction, this book totally seems plausible as the late 1800s was the time when strange touring shows tested the public’s imagination and sense of propriety. The book even pays homage to the famous Ripley of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not in mentioning that Dr. Black came across an obviously faked specimen of a monkey’s head grafted to a fish’s body, purported to be some kind of tropical mermaid.

Once the biography is done, the rest of the book is Dr. Black’s unpublished master work, The Codex Extinct Animalia, which is an anatomical guide to various taxonomies of legendary creatures with commentary, such as stating that the minotaur is a creature with the worst possible traits of two animals, with none of gifts that the full bodies of those animals would provide. It has a human body with the head of a bull. It does not have a human mind to use the human body, and it doesn’t have a bull’s body to make use of its ability to charge or its strength.

It’s an awesomely macabre story as told via biography. Quite often I found myself wanting to hit up Wikipedia and read more about Dr. Black.

http://quirkbooks.com/TheResurrectionist

My piece about Bitcoin

As some of you know, Bitcoins are the new cryptocurrency currently sweeping the planet.

People are touting this as the end of government-controlled currencies, and yes, it does seem like something that’s really cool, but is it the end of money as we know it? That we have no need for government-controlled currencies?

No, I don’t think it’s the end of the Euro, Dollar, Yen, or whatever. An example of this can be found on Mt. Gox, the main Bitcoin exchange site. They list several currency exchange rates. Currently, the US Dollar is worth around $125 per bitcoin.

Sounds great, right? Well, yes, but…

The Bitcoin isn’t like the US Dollar where you have two decimal places of currency, like $0.00.

The Bitcoin goes to eight decimal places, so it’s 0.00000000.

To make this explanation easy, let’s imagine that one bitcoin (1.00000000) is worth $100 USD. So then we can say with certainty that….

0.1 BTC is ten dollars
0.01 BTC is one dollar
0.001 BTC is ten cent
0.0001 is one cent

Anything beyond that is pretty hard to communicate in terms of USD.

Okay, so, now, I have 0.00369536 BTC.

In our example, that would be $0.37 cent.

Over the past few days, I’ve been working off and on on a few “get bitcoins here” sites, most of which give 0.00000020 or less.

Oddly, even Crowdflower has programs that pay in BTC, but not a whole lot, like above. And yes, most of the BTC I’ve earned came from a few things they offered. Now, what’s odd, is that Crowdflower also offers small assignments via Amazon’s Turk program, where some things might pay 1 to 8 cent or so per task.

That eight cent would be 0.0008 BTC. So compare that to the 37 cent I’ve earned so far, and you see that by using those programs is a humongous waste of time since the ability to get up to the top three rungs of BTC will take far longer than just earning regular money.

Crowdflower also gets to pay out far smaller amounts than if the payout was in a recognized currency, such as USD.

So then, how to get BTC?

Apparently you can mine for it using computer hardware, but of course, my computer is too old and slow to be able to mine, either solo or as a group mining effort. The “mining” is essentially making your computer crunch numbers in an effort to uncover and decode new blocks of BTC data.

There was an article on Boingboing a few days ago where a guy who joined a joint mining group wrote about it. He earned more money from ads attached to his blog post about mining than he did mining for the week after he wrote it.

Another way is to do work in exchange for BTC. But of course, the problem with that is you’re paid in BTC, not USD, and 99.9999999999% of companies only accept money in USD right now. And because of that, I can’t put gas in my car with BTC or buy groceries with it either.

I liken the Bitcoin as almost a real-world version of the Darknet Credits from Daemon and Freedom (books by Daniel Suarez), or even World of Warcraft Gold. They have their uses, but so far too few people use them. Of course, as I’ve read many times over, it’s still the early days and there’s still plenty of coins to mine.

Of course, who knows where BTC will go. The price jumps around so much. At one point, 1 BTC was worth $10, then it shot up to $240, and is now around $125.

Just looking at the exchanges and stuff on blockchain.info is enough to get anyone wanting to jump on the bandwagon.

The Casual Vacancy

 

The Casual Vacancy is J.K. Rowling’s most looked-forward-to book, aside from books 2 through 7 of the Harry Potter series, and is her first book to have absolutely nothing to do with Harry Potter, or that universe.

On page two, the incident that sparks the casual vacancy happens: A councilor of a small British town dies.

This sparks a gigantic grab for the now-vacated seat. One group wants someone who is “Pro-Fields” to get it, while another group wants someone that is against the Fields to get it.

Just what is the Fields and why should anyone care?

The Fields is the “rough part of town” where just about everyone is an addict of some type, or will most likely be one in the future. Barry, the late councilor was from the Fields and therefore a Pro-Fields kind of guy.

There’s a bit of political back and forth over which township the Fields actually belongs to. It was created by a town near Pagford, but was pretty much given to Pagford over the years.

The story bounces between the happenings of the adults and the happenings of the kids. As to which group is the main group, that’s up to the reader’s speculation. For me, it seems as though the kids are the main characters, though the amount of characterization found in the adults and the children is breathtakingly marvelous. You really feel for their plights. Well, most of their plights.

One thing I thought was a bit off was Barry’s family, the ones hit the hardest by his death are the characters that are mentioned the least. It’s as if no one cares what happens to them. They pop up here and there, but they aren’t even minor characters.

This is as far from Harry Potter as you can get. I’m sure that Rowling couldn’t wait until she could write something that wasn’t “magical” to show people that she could write as well as anyone else could. In my opinion, she suffers from Kingitis, that is, an inflammation of words. On one hand, wordiness makes the world more alive, but it also makes the reading a bit of a chore.

After reading this the first thought that came to mind was, I wonder what Harry, Hermione, and Ron were up to when they weren’t actively being written about. 

Tales of the Abyss

I don’t think I’ve done many video game reviews, but after spending nearly 60 hours playing this one over the past few weeks, I really want to, and also it’d help to get this site out of the dearth of material that’s been plaguing me over the past year. I only posted a handful of stuff last year? This year will be different.

Anyway, when I started playing Tales of the Abyss, I thought it felt very familiar. Turns out I had watched the first few episodes of the anime and had possibly played some of the original PS2 game.

They say that no one ever reads the same book, that when you read a book you compare the story to previous stories. So too with games. Once I was past the “this is familiar because of the anime” problem, it morphed into the “this is familiar because this is almost every game I have ever played” problem.

The story starts with Luke, a young noble who is forbidden from leaving his manor because he had been kidnapped when he was ten, seven years ago and lost his memory. A woman appears and attempts to kill his mentor, yet Luke interferes and somehow he and the interloper vanish only to be transplanted somewhere hundreds or thousands of miles away.

The two work together to get back home and along the way learn more about each other and their plights. Eventually they make it back and all’s good, or is it?

While a few things from nearly every RPG ever made pops up, there’s enough variety in the story and characters to make this a great way to spend nearly 60 hours.

The characters are all excellently written and acted. My favorite character was Jade Curtiss, a Malkuth soldier who always has something sarcastic to say or otherwise delivers the best comebacks.

Fighting in this game is reminiscent of Star Ocean and the other Tales games in that the player controls a character and the computer controls the other three in a massive free-for-all, though you can control the tactics of the other characters and direct them to use certain attacks.

The battles seem to be pretty easy. My entire party only died in battle once through the entire game. Battles play out by spamming the Attack button while having your other characters bust out with attacks, spells, and healing as needed.

One of the plots of the game concerns a clones and the original person, this was the story I was really concerned about. If everyone was born to fulfill some purpose, what about those that were created just because science said they could be and then discarded without a thought? As such, several of the clone characters have a drive and a will to survive, to be better than the original. A superiority complex. While others see themselves as inferior to the original.

In all, this was a fun game and I’d play it again. Once the game is finished, the player can use “Grade” – a numerical form of experience gained after battles (but different from normal experience) to use on different variables in a subsequent play through, such as keeping the old levels, the ability to gain more experience, keeping items, etc. I’ve not tried to play the game again with any of these yet, I mean, the game itself was 60 hours, do I really want to play it for another 60? One day.

Another thing I liked (and would love to see in future RPGs) is a journal feature. The main character suffered memory loss as a kid so he keeps a fastidious journal that’s updated extremely often. If you have no idea where to go, check out the journal, it’ll point you in the right direction.