The fact that the government entities already have the information suggest that they are selling the information to create a screen for their self funding operations. The theft of ID and banking information can be directly correlated to the illegal monitoring by governmental entities. Once the information is obtained by the governmental entities they recoup their cost by selling it whole sale into exploitative markets.
Posted by Slicker at August 23, 2006 07:02 PMrecent item
Commission Proposes Radical Change To Data Protection Rules For ISPs And Telcos
http://www.mondaq.com/article.asp?articleid=42460&hotopic=1
from above:
Contained in a "Staff Working Document"1 the Commission states (without giving its source) that "the market has so far failed to address security problems to the satisfaction of users". To remedy this problem it proposes to require providers of electronic communications networks and services to:
* notify the relevant national regulator of any breach of security that led to the loss of personal data and/or to interruptions in the continuity of service supply. The regulator would then be able to inform the general public of the breach if they considered that it was in the public interest to do so; and
* notify their customers of any breach of security leading to the loss, modification or destruction of, or unauthorised access to, customer personal data.
... snip ...
for other topic drift ... i was co-author of the x9.99 financial standard ... and as part of that work put together a merged privacy taxonomy and glossary ... drawing on multiple sources (eu-dpd, glba, hipaa, etc)
http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/index.html#glosnote