apologies if people have seen this already, but I can't resist it...
>
>http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,56860,00.html
>Keeping Track of John Poindexter
>By Paul Boutin | Also by this reporter Page 1 of 1
>
>
>
>02:00 AM Dec. 14, 2002 PT
>The head of the government's Total Information Awareness project, which
>aims
>to root out potential terrorists by aggregating credit-card, travel,
>medical,
>school and other records of everyone in the United States, has himself
>become
>a target of personal data profiling.
>Online pranksters, taking their lead from a San Francisco journalist, are
>publishing John Poindexter's home phone number, photos of his house and
>other
>personal information to protest the TIA program.
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>
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>Matt Smith, a columnist for SF Weekly, printed the material -- which he
>says
>is all publicly available -- in a recent column: "Optimistically, I dialed
>John and Linda Poindexter's number -- (301) 424-6613 -- at their home at 10
>Barrington Fare in Rockville, Md., hoping the good admiral and excused
>criminal might be able to offer some insight," Smith wrote.
>"Why, for example, is their $269,700 Rockville, Md., house covered with
>artificial siding, according to Maryland tax records? Shouldn't a Reagan
>conspirator be able to afford repainting every seven years? Is the Donald
>Douglas Poindexter listed in Maryland sex-offender records any relation to
>the good admiral? What do Tom Maxwell, at 8 Barrington Fare, and James
>Galvin, at 12 Barrington Fare, think of their spooky neighbor?"
>Smith said he wrote the column to demonstrate the sense of violation he
>felt
>over his personal records being profiled by secretive government agencies.
>"I needed to call Poindexter anyway, and it seemed like a worthy concept
>that
>if he's going to be compiling data that most certainly will leak around to
>other departments and get used, one way to get readers to think about it
>was
>to turn that around," Smith said.
>What Smith didn't realize was that Poindexter's phone number and other
>information would end up on more than 100 Web pages a week later as others
>took up the cause.
>Phone-phreaking hackers supplied details on the Verizon switch serving the
>admiral's home. The popular Cryptome privacy-issues website posted
>satellite
>photos of the house.
>Poindexter could not be reached for comment for this story, and calls to
>his
>home phone now reach a recording: "The party you are calling is not
>available
>at this time."
>Since the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency began awarding
>contracts
>for the Total Information Awareness project in August, the effort has been
>criticized by both civil rights advocates and data-mining experts.
>The dispute over TIA seems to fall not along straight political party
>lines,
>but between advocates and opponents of the government's right to monitor
>its
>own citizens. Former President Clinton expressed support for the project in
>a
>recent public appearance, while conservative New York Times columnist
>William
>Safire recently wrote a pointed editorial criticizing the idea.
>One Bush voter, speaking on condition of anonymity, said of the pranks on
>Poindexter: "If they're making him as uncomfortable as we are, good."
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