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The NSA FOIA Office Sent Me Someone Else's Private Document By Mistake

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Re: The NSA FOIA Office Sent Me Someone Else's Private Document By Mistake

#11
post #9

You mean mistakes sometimes get made ? Shock horror. Now what is this doing on HN again ?

This is on HN because NSA has craploads of information on everyone, and errors like these can send that information to people that should not have it. Proving the point, that NSA should not have that craploads of information stored in first place.

You do know that it is a FOI request i.e. freely accessible by the public ?

And of course the NSA should have craploads of information. It's their job.

Re: The NSA FOIA Office Sent Me Someone Else's Private Document By Mistake

#12
and now that I have his full name, home address, and personal phone number, it's easy to learn other things about him -- he's a software engineer at Google, etc, etc.

And now that you've exposed his gender, initials, part of his address, and part of his phone number, and his profession and employer, so can anyone else who knows how to locate people through databases (I do, but I didn't). I'm a little mystified about why you only half-redacted his information - did you need to include his apartment #, which in combination with his zipcode allows me to eliminate a large number of addresses from that neighborhood immediately, or the area code on his phone, which tells me where he used to live, or his place of employment? As someone who used to live in the same area, I even have a pretty good idea of where to find him at specific times of the day.

You're right to critique the NSA for its carelessness, but I'm at a loss as to why you would then go ahead to magnify their error by posting some of his PII on the Internet and publicizing it on HN.

Re: The NSA FOIA Office Sent Me Someone Else's Private Document By Mistake

#13
post #10

Should the that fact that he made two simple spelling errors[1] "beaurocracy" and "undemines" leave us to wonder about the veracity of his statements? Everyone makes mistakes. Before he received the second letter did he think NSA was infallible? [1] And/or the questionable use of "the letters' assurances."

I'm willing to overlooked botched spellings of "bureaucracy" because it doesn't take much of a misspelling to get beyond what many spell checkers can handle. More than once, to get the red squiggle to go away I've had to resort to finding an article that used the word and copying from that. (The Wikipedia article on the movie "Brazil" is good for that).
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