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U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

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Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#61

Seeing drone dropped grenades everywhere in Ukraine has made me worried about normalized "drone drop murders" spreading to the rest of the world. With widely available addresses gang violence, political killings, and even online flamewar escalations will become much much uglier. Who needs to do a driveby shooting if you could drop a homemade bomb from a McDonalds bathroom 20 miles away using some jailbroken drone? Vi…

Sometimes the US perspective of things is completely surreal for me as a European. In a country where you can buy assault rifles with minimal background checks, people worry about addresses being available because someone might be able to look up the address to kill them with a drone and a home made bomb.

Curious what you define as "minimal background checks" and "assault rifles" as

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#62
post #51

On Linkedin there's all kinds of "Top Secret/Security Clearance" groups which lists all the members in that group. Some have 5 thousand people. Sure, some of those users don't actually have clearance at all, but many actually do, and work at firms all doing contracting for the federal government. Call me crazy, but giving out a list of people with clearance to the highest levels of secrets, usually doing tech work, i…

in a similar area, it absolutely pains me to see the amount of personal information demanded by online job applications. realistically how hard would it be for me to set up a fake job listing on Indeed and just hoover up highly valuable PII? you could even take it further with personality tests, IQ scores, RATs, etc. if you were a foreign power wanting to gather data on defence programmers, for blackmail, corruption,…

I've been personally dealing with this exact thing. And it doesn't help that linkedin is a shit show of fake companies and job postings that seem to be doing exactly what you said, phishing for PII. Like, why the fuck is a job application asking me for my address? It's a remote job, the absolute most you would ever need is my city. There's a lot of companies that think I'm the very lucky resident at 123 Main St :) The day a job application asks for my SSN is the day I quit tech for good and go work for cash only under the table

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#63

On Linkedin there's all kinds of "Top Secret/Security Clearance" groups which lists all the members in that group. Some have 5 thousand people. Sure, some of those users don't actually have clearance at all, but many actually do, and work at firms all doing contracting for the federal government. Call me crazy, but giving out a list of people with clearance to the highest levels of secrets, usually doing tech work, i…

[deleted]

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why hasn't that happened yet? Also, the government is going to continue indefinitely printing money whether or not we have social security.

It has, inflation is rising rapidly in no small part due to the gov printing money to cover its obligations, of which social security is one of the largest and will only become larger as the cost of living increases due to said inflation- a vicious cycle. If contributions don't cover the payouts (which they don't, and never will unless you tax the younger generations to death) then the difference has to be made up wi…

But social security has been a constant ~20% of spending for 50 years. Inflation has not been constant at all during that time, and has even dipped below 0. How is that possible if social security is a major contributor to inflation?

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the US perspective of things is completely surreal for me as a European. In a country where you can buy assault rifles with minimal background checks, people worry about addresses being available because someone might be able to look up the address to kill them with a drone and a home made bomb.

Curious what you define as "minimal background checks" and "assault rifles" as

They already said they're European. The terms you mentioned are very Americanized/America-centric phrases.

The rest of the world doesn't really have the same concern or context, because the rest of the world doesn't have the same issues or political/media environment.

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#66

On Linkedin there's all kinds of "Top Secret/Security Clearance" groups which lists all the members in that group. Some have 5 thousand people. Sure, some of those users don't actually have clearance at all, but many actually do, and work at firms all doing contracting for the federal government. Call me crazy, but giving out a list of people with clearance to the highest levels of secrets, usually doing tech work, i…

It’s pretty normal for job seeking since there are jobs that require a clearance before any other consideration. There’s a whole job site dedicated to clearances. https://www.clearancejobs.com

Nice now I know where my moles need to submit their resumes!

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh. As a member of a generation that has grown up tacitly understanding that social security will very likely be insolvent/cancelled by the time that we're old enough to qualify for it, and thus we shouldn't rely on it whatsoever—it's surreal to consciously connect these two concepts. For me, "social security number" is just the name for the ID number that so many of us have and are used to writing everywhere. The n…

There's an interesting story about how the social security number evolved to being much more than just for social security. Quick 5 minute primer: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus&pp=ygUYY2dwIGdyZXk...

Short link without tracking id (si=): https://youtu.be/Erp8IAUouus

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#68

Seeing drone dropped grenades everywhere in Ukraine has made me worried about normalized "drone drop murders" spreading to the rest of the world. With widely available addresses gang violence, political killings, and even online flamewar escalations will become much much uglier. Who needs to do a driveby shooting if you could drop a homemade bomb from a McDonalds bathroom 20 miles away using some jailbroken drone? Vi…

Sometimes the US perspective of things is completely surreal for me as a European. In a country where you can buy assault rifles with minimal background checks, people worry about addresses being available because someone might be able to look up the address to kill them with a drone and a home made bomb.

As a European who has been living in the US for a decade, yeah, you're pretty spot on. Americans are a scared people, probably the most scared I've ever seen. Afraid of the gov't, the neighbors, and random people they don't even know. I've gotten a ton of hate as a foreigner and I am not surprised a hateful, greedy and selfish population like here is afraid somebody will take them out with an improvised device.

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#69
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes the US perspective of things is completely surreal for me as a European. In a country where you can buy assault rifles with minimal background checks, people worry about addresses being available because someone might be able to look up the address to kill them with a drone and a home made bomb.

As a European who has been living in the US for a decade, yeah, you're pretty spot on. Americans are a scared people, probably the most scared I've ever seen. Afraid of the gov't, the neighbors, and random people they don't even know. I've gotten a ton of hate as a foreigner and I am not surprised a hateful, greedy and selfish population like here is afraid somebody will take them out with an improvised device.

And yet, you live here.

Annals of revealed preferences.

Re: U.S. military members' personal data being sold by online brokers

#70

On Linkedin there's all kinds of "Top Secret/Security Clearance" groups which lists all the members in that group. Some have 5 thousand people. Sure, some of those users don't actually have clearance at all, but many actually do, and work at firms all doing contracting for the federal government. Call me crazy, but giving out a list of people with clearance to the highest levels of secrets, usually doing tech work, i…

I'm not going to call you crazy but the opposite policy - trying to keep these secret would definitely be crazy. It would be impractical, ineffective and at odds with all sorts of notions of an open, democratic society.
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