Date: Mon, 02 Jan 95 07:51:14 EST Errors-To: Comp-privacy Error Handler From: Computer Privacy Digest Moderator To: Comp-privacy@uwm.edu Subject: Computer Privacy Digest V6#001 Computer Privacy Digest Mon, 02 Jan 95 Volume 6 : Issue: 001 Today's Topics: Moderator: Leonard P. Levine Social Security and the Green Card Credit Reporting Ohio Supreme Court Upholds Cordless Phone Privacy Re: Must I Always Carry I.D? Re: School Monitoring Re: School Monitoring Info on CPD [new] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: Jannick Johnsson Date: 31 Dec 1994 15:56:05 GMT Subject: Social Security and the Green Card Organization: NeoSoft Internet Services +1 713 684 5969 I am an legal immigrant with 20 years in USA (Texas) and I have paid the full amount in SS every year for the last 20 years. Where can I find information what will happen to this money and the money my employer has paid in my SS acount. Is this money lost if I return to my home country (Denmark) or is it paid to me when I leave. Can I get my SS paid to me if I take residence in Denmark. I have tried to ask the SS office in Houston they told me Uncle Sam will get the money when I leave, I do not think this is right!!! I appriciate any answer. -- Jannick Johnsson EMAIL wiking@neosoft.com ------------------------------ From: mea@intgp1.att.com (Mark E Anderson +1 708 979 4716) Date: 01 Jan 95 01:28:00 GMT Subject: Credit Reporting Robert Ellis Smith <0005101719@mcimail.com> wrote: Just before the holiday there were some inquiries about credit reports. Here are some answers: The practice of doing a credit check of everybody on a list before sending a mailing is legal so long as everybody who makes the cut gets a bona fide extensio n of credit. It's called prescreening. I was under the imression that any company running a credit check on you required your signature. This is true with my credit report. A couple of years ago and a couple of days before I was about to close on my current residence, the loan company refused to issue the loan because they finally found three recent hits on my credit report. A month earlier, I had opened a bank account in return for a "free" cellular phone. The bank hit me twice by talking me into overdraft protection and a free credit card. The cellular company hit me once upon subscription. This mess caused my closing to be delayed by a month incurring a lot of extra lawyer fees. I receive the so called pre-approved credit cards and credit in the mail about once a week and rip them up without bothering to open the envelope. None of these outfits have touched my credit report from what I've seen. -- Mark Anderson mea@intgp1.att.com ------------------------------ From: jeffn@meaddata.com (Jeff Nye) Date: 01 Jan 1995 17:57:04 GMT Subject: Ohio Supreme Court Upholds Cordless Phone Privacy Organization: LEXIS-NEXIS, a division of Reed-Elsevier The Ohio Supreme Court, in a recent 7-0 decision to uphold the 1991 conviction of Ivo Bidinost Jr. for child-rape, said that the recordings of cordless telephone conversations used in the 1991 case are illegal. According to the Dayton Daily News of 01 Jan 95 the Court went further to say that privacy is a right no matter the technology. ------------------------------ From: paddles@zeta.org.au (Tim Anderson) Date: 02 Jan 1995 14:50:50 +1100 Subject: Re: Must I Always Carry I.D? Organization: Kralizec Dialup Unix Sydney, +61-2-837-1183 V.32bis On 11 Nov 1994, amy young-leith wrote: If you are pulled over and you HAVE a valid drivers license issued to you, but you don't have it WITH you (it's at home on the table or in your purse slung on the chair or...), is THAT a crime? Will you be charged with something? Will you have any chance to obtain your license to avoid this charge if there is one? "David C. Frier" writes: I have been in traffic court and seen a succession of cases dismissed by the judge after the defendants, all of whom had been charged with "driving without a license," produced the licenses that had been at home on the table or in the other pants or whatever. I think it al depends on the laws in your state and/or country. In my state (New South Wales, Australia) it is an offence to drive without having your license with you; the offence carries an on-the-spot fine. However in at least one adjacent state the law says you have 24 hours to produce a license to anyone who has a right to see it. Presumably the same sorts of variations will be evident in the United States and other countries with different states. -- Tim Anderson | paddles@kralizec.zeta.org.au | Sydney, Australia +1100 | Thing! For net.reasons I can't name the statutory broadcaster I program computers for Single Christian male seeks witty comment to share sig block. Apply by email. ------------------------------ From: gmcgath@condes.MV.COM (Gary McGath) Date: 31 Dec 1994 17:42:36 GMT Subject: Re: School Monitoring Organization: Conceptual Design ranck@earn.net (Bill Ranck) wrote: Never heard of the Postal Inspectors? They certainly can inspect mail. There just isn't a notice on the mailboxes. Two people in this thread have made similar claims (though the other one said it applies only to parcels). Does anyone have some real information on this? I'm reasonably sure it's illegal for postal inspectors to open first class mail without a warrant. I don't know what the situation is for parcels. -- Gary McGath gmcgath@condes.mv.com PGP Signature: 3E B3 62 C8 F8 9E E9 3A 67 E7 71 99 71 BD FA 29 ------------------------------ From: Wayne Frost <75000.1251@compuserve.com> Date: 30 Dec 94 17:13:26 EST Subject: Re: School Monitoring Jim C (collins@nova.umd.edu) wrote: "Recently, the logon banner at my school/internet provider has had an unsettling addition to it: 'All usage of this system is monitored for security purposes, and by signing on to the system you are implicitly consenting to th is monitoring.' Yipes! What are the implications of this? Is this even legal? I don't expect to pick up the phone and hear 'By using this service you are implicityly consenting to being monitored for security purposes..." Why not? It is legal. I am employed in the banking industry, in the area that I work in we accept telephone calls from our customers to initiate financial transactions. When a customer wants to do business with us a contract is executed which includes a clause in which the customer agrees that we will record all telephone conversations. Customers call in to an automated call distribution system, which has an automatic announcement message telling the customers that they will be recorded, and then when one of our human operators gets the customer call, the operator's script includes notice that the call is being recorded. We also introduce a beep tone on our telephone lines that are recorded. To my knowledge no customer has ever refused to sign the contract because of the monitoring clause. The investment in monitoring and recording equipment (which is substantial, in my area we have the capability of recording more than 100 telephone conversations concurrently) is well worth the expense and our efforts at disclosure. We have used the recordings to correct inappropriate behavior by our staff or by our customers' representatives who call us (by playing or delivering cassettes of their conversations to their management), and to resolve responsibility when errors have been made in financial transactions (this is very important because of the potential financial penalties associated with delayed or misdirected transactions, if the bank made the error, the bank eats the penalty, if the customer made the error, the bank does not pay the penalty). Playing back a recording to one of our staff members when they have either made an error in the transaction, or have not comported themselves according to our standards, is a very powerful behavior modification tool. You can't dispute the sound of your own voice. This has also worked very well when the problem has been on the customer's side. We have not had to take any recordings to court yet, but we would anticipate that with all of our disclosures, any recordings we did want to introduce in court would be admissable. In our experience the only time that a customer has objected to the recording activity was when the customer was an attorney. This Legal Eagle, as some lawyers seem to enjoy doing, was attempting to intimidate one of our representatives when he called us on the phone and heard the beep tone, however our response to any objections, or implied threats from callers lilke this "gentleman" (please don't get me wrong here, I am not pointing the finger at all attorneys, just the few that seem to get off on abusing the general public with their status as attorneys), are dealt with very simply. If you object to being recorded by us, then you have the option of not talking to us, but we are not going to talk to you without recording the conversation. In my opinion businesses have a legitemate right to monitor the activities of their staff or agents when those people are supposed to be acting in their official, business activities. We do not embark on "fishing expeditions" with this equipment, we are not sitting in a room hour after hour, day after day, listing to telephone conversations. But we do play back conversations when an issue has been brought to our attention, either as a complaint or service issue that has been opened by a customer or if we have independent evidence that we may have a staff behavior problem. We also do occasionally perform random monitoring of calls, and this is part of our overall quality control problem, we do not, however, use these tools for "fishing expeditions". Working in a bank, in a secured enviroment, we are also subject to other monitoring, we use access control cards to enter an leave our building and various internal areas. We are under video surveilance throughout our building and the grounds around its perimeter. We are subject to the various system and data security controls through our access to mainframe, LAN's and stand-alone PC systems. We use both voice mail and electronic mail that may be subject to monitoring. There are computer programs used by our internal auditors to monitor our employee checking accounts and report any extraordinary activity. So there is potentially a heck of a lot of opportunity to monitor just about anything we do here, but my sense is that it is not abused. I do not feel violated in any way. When the rent-a-cop down in the security control room has to keep an eye on 60 video monitors, do you think he really sees anything? Now if I ever thought that somebody had put together an application system that would gather all of the data available from all of the above sources, collate it and permit uncontrolled inquiries, I would probably have a problem with that. As an aside, I hear a report on one of the news radio stations today that some woman, in Atlanta, I believe, received a police scanner from her husband for Christmas. So she began listing to it, and lo and behold she apparently picked up a conversation between a neighbor woman and her lover. (I am guessing that maybe they were in a phone conversation in which one of the parties must have been using a cordless phone.) They were plotting to kill the woman's husband and make it look like a burglary. Needless to say they have been arrested and charged with attempted murder. Anyone want to bet that some attorney for the defense is going to claim unauthorized recording of a telephone conversation. It woud be interesting to see what the laws say about eavsdropping on cordless telephone conversations. I am willing to bet that the court would uphold any evidence gathered this way in this case, in that by virtue of the fact that you are voluntarilly using a cordless telephone, you are implying that you know and do not object to the fact that someone else might be listening in. I think all of this boils down to the simple fact that in order to maintain our privacy, we all have to agree to trust that none of us will abuse the tools or information that come before us. -- Wayne Frost Monterey Park, CA 75000.1251@compuserve.com ------------------------------ From: "Prof. L. P. Levine" Date: 29 Dec 1994 10:50:22 -0600 (CST) Subject: Info on CPD [new] Organization: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee The Computer Privacy Digest is a forum for discussion on the effect of technology on privacy or vice versa. 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Contributions generally are acknowledged within 24 hours of submission. If selected, they are printed within two or three days. The moderator reserves the right to delete extraneous quoted material. He may change the SUBJECT: line of an article in order to make it easier for the reader to follow a discussion. He will not, however, alter or edit or append to the text except for purely technical reasons. A library of back issues is available on ftp.cs.uwm.edu [129.89.9.18]. Login as "ftp" with password identifying yourid@yoursite. The archives are in the directory "pub/comp-privacy". People with gopher capability can most easily access the library at gopher.cs.uwm.edu. Mosaic users will find it at gopher://gopher.cs.uwm.edu. Older archives are also held at ftp.pica.army.mil [129.139.160.133]. ---------------------------------+----------------------------------------- Leonard P. Levine | Moderator of: Computer Privacy Digest Professor of Computer Science | and comp.society.privacy University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | Post: comp-privacy@uwm.edu Box 784, Milwaukee WI 53201 | Information: comp-privacy-request@uwm.edu | Gopher: gopher.cs.uwm.edu levine@cs.uwm.edu | Mosaic: gopher://gopher.cs.uwm.edu ---------------------------------+----------------------------------------- ------------------------------ End of Computer Privacy Digest V6 #001 ****************************** .