Japan used to require all foreigners entering their country to be fingerprinted. They abandoned this policy due to privacy concerns and, as far as I'm concerned, this is a Good Thing. More and more countries, rather than honestly asking themselves, "what can we do to to make the world a better place?", have simply given up, assumed things are bad, and just assume that violating our privacy is a necessary evil in their fight against reason terrorism.

Giving into terror hysteria, Japan again requires foreigners to be fingerprinted.

Of course, if you're disturbed by the idea of the mounting assaults on our privacy, this probably bothers you. Offhand, short of hiring a plastic surgeon, I am only familiar with one way of changing your fingerprints. You get someone to press their fingerprints into modeling clay. Then you spray the prints with jeweler's oil, apply Nu Skin (they have a clear artificial skin product), and when it sets, carefully peel off the prints. Then you superglue them to your fingertips and carefully pierce the prints with a needle to let your natural oils cover the prints. More Nu Skin will need to be applied to blend the fingerprint edges into your own skin.

Of course, the other person is probably not going to want to be implicated in whatever you do, so it helps if they're unconscious when you borrow their prints. This is probably not a viable route.

Enter "mock". This is the online handle of a rather curious gentleman I've met at a couple of conferences. He's a security researcher and is passionate about privacy. He decided that the trick would be to remove his fingerprints. He researched various methods and actually tried them. Then he posted a blog entry about how to remove your fingerprints. He even has a PDF of slides of his attempts. And yes, he even pressed his fingers into a frying pan with hot, smoking oil (it didn't work but it hurt like hell).

He claims he successfully made it through Japanese customs and he actually had to wait in a line of people who didn't have fingerprints. Curiously, he mentioned they were mostly old Chinese women. I'm wondering how that came about.

The downside of this, as mock points out, is that you probably want to have a plausible reason why you don't have fingerprints. That last bit has me stumped.

Musa Abu Marzouk is allegedly the leader for Hamas in Amman, Jordan, and Damascus and is apparently responsible for coordinating and directing terrorist attacks against Israel. I have his date of birth and place of birth. Of course, if you read enough newspaper articles, you can probably glean this, too. However, I also have his US Social Security number and his Egyptian passport number and I'm going to tell you what they are and how to find them.

( More than you want to know )

Just got a call from my Visa company. Did I just make a charge of $4,395.00 at Zonelabs? Uh, no.

Damn it. This time it's done over the net and there's not much I can do. I called Zonelabs but they refused to give me any information about this. Fortunately, the charge was denied and I'll be getting a new card issued, but this is getting old.

Why won't they give me any information? They're afraid of getting sued. Why won't the credit card company give me any more information? They're afraid of getting sued. Everyone is so afraid of everyone else that no one will share any damned information.

This morning, I found out that thousands of dollars of charges had been made on two of my credit cards in the past two days. Now, the identity thieves are sitting in jail. This is how it happened. It involves identity theft, a careless thief, one pissed-off Ovid and lots of luck.

I mentioned earlier that it took me less than an hour to find them, but it really depends on when you start counting. Maybe two hours is more accurate. Eh, who cares? They're caught. And where I have times listed, these are the times pulled off of my cell phone.
( Catching the bad guys )

If you have a T-Mobile phone, you might want to ask them why the fuck they didn't tell you your personal information was stolen? I'm a little irritated by this.

Someone out there may now have my name, my date of birth, my Social Security Number and other little details necessary to make me a victim of identity theft. Thank you T-Mobile. Thank you very much for not bothering to say anything.

Oh, and did you use their email service? Many of those passwords were ripped off, too. Since people reuse passwords, you might want to think about whether or not you reused yours and and whether you had sensitive information sent through your phone.

Of course, it's possible that it's not T-Mobile's fault:

T-Mobile, which apparently knew of the intrusions by July of last year, has not issued any public warning. Under California's anti-identity theft law "SB1386," the company is obliged to notify any California customers of a security breach in which their personally identifiable information is "reasonably believed to have been" compromised. That notification must be made in "the most expedient time possible and without unreasonable delay," but may be postponed if a law enforcement agency determines that the disclosure would compromise an investigation.

Since the Secret Service was investigating, perhaps they asked T-Mobile not to say anything. That raises an interesting point. The Secret Service wants the criminal but to gather enough information to stop the criminal meant putting more people at risk. But since neither T-Mobile nor the Secret Service are willing to discuss this, we can't get to the heart of the matter.

So this begs an interesting question, how many people should we allow to be hurt in the interest of catching criminals? How much damage will the investigation do as opposed to the actual crime? I'm not saying the criminal should just go free, but there are some serious problems here and much of the root of the problem is the government refusing to pass privacy laws that would shield us from intrusive use and storage of our personal information.