[Author’s note: I am a bit of an arm-chair lawyer when it comes to personal freedoms. When reading this article, recall that I do not support any criminal activity, but that extends to the police as well. Too often, illegal means are used to entrap people, a tactic which the authorities call by the euphemism “creative law enforcement”. It is not, the police are breaking the law. The point I'm making here is not about any sex crime, but how a group of men were targeted by a sting operation and their lives and careers were ruined despite the fact none were found guilty.]
For now, ignore the fact that so many men could be so clueless (the ad was on a website), and think about what happened. Total entrapment and arrest for a “thought crime”--nothing illegal had yet occurred. Don’t think because they will have to be released makes it all just a warning. The arrest record will be published on the Internet and these men are now marked for life.
Within a couple of questions I had determined the real problem. These men had not systematically protected their identities. These men still don’t realize the danger of letting people keep files, and in each case the state was able to find out exactly what their education was and hold it against them (by denying them funds for a lawyer). This was in the newspaper, how on average they had so spend $16,000 each to get acquitted, since no crime had taken place. If you are not protecting your identity, you are not obeying the Constitution or adequately protecting yourself in a hostile environment.
They showed these men on TV, another item to avoid. Bad publicity, and take my word, this will only get worse as the Internet takes over. Each man that spoke admitted they gave out private information against their free will, because they believed they would benefit or would be punished by not telling the whole truth. The classic bureaucratic sucker job. "Tell the police what happened and they'll let you go." The whole truth is never in order. A blank spot is neither false nor misleading, how many times I gotta tell you?
[Author's note: From time to time, I am asked what set me against the bureaucracy so many years back. That is an easy answer – the Student Finance Board. I am not “against” the system, rather I am fascinated by how it works opposite to personal freedoms. I learned to restrict the amount of information given out to strangers, believing every file is a permanently lost freedom. This is not active resistance by any means, merely an inclination not to provide ammunition to a potential adversary. A good example is when someone asks if you have any ID. Where you reach for your wallet, I don't. I simply reply that I do. Right? They did not ask to see it and may have no legal right to it, but they’ve got you thinking if you don’t show it, you’re hiding something. I mean, you didn’t fall for that. Did you?]
Where did I learn all this? Easy. The student finance board. They put the screws to me when I was a kid, so I decided to make them fight for every penny. (The issue was that I’d borrowed the money at 4.5% and they wanted it back at 28.5%.) Thus, I was able to watch the mechanisms used to trace me, what threw them off the trail, and what type of actions they could take to force a repayment. In the end, I was quite successful, paying back only the principle by the time I was 38. But for the average student, that would be next to impossible. You had to suspect something from the start.
They could never find me (although they tried some incredibly sneaky tactics) and in the end proved that income tax records are not so private after all. That information alone was well worth the $8,000 it took them 20 years to get out of me. I know exactly what not to do. It was during this process that I learned how far nastier people than the Student Finance Board were abusing information.
The worst offender by any standard is the DMV, the Motor Vehicle Branch. So much so that the information is hardly ever used for any other purpose but to conduct illegal searches. (All background or identity searches conducted without a warrant are illegal in America.) That is why all my vehicles have been registered to an anonymous company name--I was on to the system because I never had a vehicle until I was 21, by which time I was cautious. By the simple expedient of registering my vehicles “across the border” I was able to watch the terrible confusion and analyze their tactics.
It is actually pretty amazing the amount of trouble an outfit like the Student Finance Board can cause in your life if they get hold of your driver’s license information. My argument is that my vehicle registration should not be used by creditors or even police, because that is not the reason the information was originally given, or you are potentially providing information that will be used against you—something the Constitution says you can’t do. The authorities don’t exactly make it plain that by passing a driving test, you are also creating a database file that will follow you for life. That is a pretty sneaky way of doing business.
And for the record, there is no tradition or history of requiring people to register their ID for a driver's license. This entire driver's license vehicle registration. nonsense was started by some obscure US senator so he could claim he was "doing something".
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