For 18 years I thought she was stealing my identity, until I found her
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This could all be prevented. These organizations are just flat-out negligent and don't care.
THEY: <confusing nonsense>
I: What are you talking about?
THEY: You know what I'm talking about. Don't play dumb.
I: (after 10 seconds of thought) How many people named $NAME attend this school?
THEY: <checking records>
THEY: ... Two. Get back to class! Now!
They truly do not care. If there is a problem, it is your fault, for being an inconveniently irregular person. I shudder to think at how many of us would be inconvenienced if any one of the other people than share my name and birthdate were disreputable or notorious among certain government agencies.
Anecdotally, municipal and circuit court judges could care less about whether you get treated fairly or not, so long as your case does not make their job even one iota more difficult. You could do 110% of their work for them, and they still might rule capriciously, telling you to appeal if you don't like it.
The thing that pissed me off most about the article was the innocent party pleading guilty and paying fines. It made me want to leap through my screen and scream at her in person.
> It made me want to leap through my screen and scream at her in person.
That would be attacking the victim, not the person who deserves to be screamed at.
I'd like to scream at everyone who pleads guilty to something they know they didn't do. I'd also like to scream at people who take a confidential settlement that allows the other party to continue avoiding ultimate accountability for their actions, possibly creating victims of other people in the future.
They may have valid personal reasons for doing it, but "seeking an outcome better for me at the expense of everyone else" is not a strategy that engenders a lot of sympathy in me.
I have a common name, and some jobs that required background checks, and the most I have ever had to do regarding felons with similar names to my own is sign a note saying that none of those people were me.
If I were in her situation today, I would ask the company for the mailing address of its corporate attorney, and go from there.
Even though he was clearly alive and well and way taller, he'd be pulled in for questioning every time he boarded an international flight.
That's not relevant, because they probably weren't suspecting him of being the Supreme Leader, they were suspecting him of having a reason to conceal his identity (or possibly of being mentally ill).
As per your comment that it could be indicative of his mental health, I would bet my bottom dollar that this is baseless speculation, with no basis in actual research of the behavioral patterns of the mentally ill.
In short, par for the TSA course: thrash blindly around in the dark, catching no one, inconveniencing everyone to remind us all of how important they are.
"By the way, if you contact the State Department they're probably going to laugh at you."
I suppose it's an incentives thing - if I give different emails for different events, that's a problem for the government. If they have multiple people 'assigned' to my name and birthdate, that's my problem. But it's still damned sad that they're using an identifier which isn't even close to unique for topics this important.
It appears to me that google merged the addresses but he still continues to use the dotless address when signing up for things.
It amazes me that he thinks it works, surely none of the email ever gets to it?
I've tracked him down on facebook and got a message to him via his wife.... but it continues to happen. Which makes me wonder if somehow sometimes it does work for him?
There was nothing wrong with my name, until I was about 12 years old and that no talent ass clown became famous and started oppressing his people.
No way, why should I change? He's the one who sucks.
(sarcastically) If only they could check the physical descriptions. And then flag the passport as "already checked".
A true solution would have to be usable by private industry as well. If it were up to me, it would essentially be x509 (because today, you're trusting the state and the person presenting the SSN), but people lose important shit, even proof of identity, all the time.
Obviously that Id can't be kept secret.
In Ukraine we even have an opt out for crazy Russian churchgoers who believe, that having id is literally selling their soul - they just use passport number in their x509 certs.
I never understood the privacy concern that americans have about a national ID card when the government knows all the same things about them, and can abuse it in all the same ways. It's like having all the downsides of a national ID, without the upside of being protected against identity theft.
Keeping us afraid is good business for a lot of low-rent grift industries, like doomsday preppers, as well as high-level ones, like the military industrial complex.
And as to why the SSN is the way it is, it's a usage of convenience. Before the SSN there was no unique identifier for every citizen then suddenly to keep track of the new entitlement and assistance programs during the great depression one was created and companies started using it as they wanted because it was the most convenient uuid available. There's a good recent CGP Grey video about the history of SSN and why it's such a silly mess today.
For the best education on this insanity that I can reference:
Social Security Cards Explained - CGP Grey
We must have something like unique individual IDs, but a significant faction of political actors don't want it, so nothing official exists. Instead we get terrible, insecure, miserable-to-deal-with, ad hoc, de facto national IDs of various kinds. It's the worst of both worlds—no actual extra freedom, lots of pointless inconvenience, expense, risk, and anxiety. If that last list looks like what our health care system produces, too, that's not an accident—this is the kind of situation our government (and their private partners) excel at creating.
It isn't now. But it used to be meant that way. I'm not sure what or how it started.
But old SSN cards had a line printed on them (on back, IIRC - probably not the best place) which read something like "For Social Security (or maybe IRS?) Use Only - Do Not Divulge".
That line has quietly disappeared (sometime before I was born - my Dad and my Mom's SSN cards had the line, but mine doesn't). Likely because the cat got outta the bag, and they realized it no longer mattered.
I imagine that it probably started with some company or other government agency deciding to use it without authorization of the SSN/IRS - and people went along with it because "it's the government, we can trust them", or some such malarky. Furthermore, most people probably never read the back of their card to find out that they weren't supposed to give that number out to just anyone, and of course no one thought of the potential implications to which that number could be applied.
This of course applies to any form of ID using a unique identifier: Bad actors in the system can easily exploit it - and when you are identified by a number, that number (and everything attached to it) is you - regardless of whether it really is or isn't.
Of course - all of this and more was covered in the book "Database Nation" - which was widely ignored.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_documents_in_the_Unit...
For driver's license numbers, I've been asked in multiple situations to show it (for banking and employment), and seen the number written down.
It's still a slightly odd relic because I certainly would never want to depend on my SSN being secret. Even when used properly, that's still pretty wide usage.
Obviously SSN is treated as secret when it isn't. I've heard noises about re-issuing SSNs from deceased people, but didn't think it had happened. But is it not unique among living citizens? That's huge and I've never heard of it.
Think of the DMV like mcdonalds. The staff there is trained on how to perform a specific set of tasks and the task she needs completed is not something anyone there has been trained to do. It would probably involve a major Information Technology overhaul to change how their computer systems and filing records work and millions of dollars to be approved by NY state legislature and multiple bid contracts, etc. They don't keep people on staff that know how to fix issues they didn't conceive of ahead of time.
Of course you're going to get a bureaucracy Kafka would be proud of if it doesn't have to face any consequences for actions it takes.
If the police had to indemnify all parties for all damages (regardless of innocence - let the courts assign fines, not the police), they'd be reorganized with saner policies in a heartbeat.
As is... well, they should rename Russian roulette.
Exactly my thoughts while reading this. I mean just think about it: Given a nation that spans half a continent, you're bound to have two people with the same name and birth date living in the same state occasionally. HOW THE HELL can a justice system then assume that those two things are enough for a unique identification?
It boggles my mind that they would invalidate one person's driver license for another one's misdeeds. Don't they link those to something unique? You have mandatory social security numbers, right?
So, you have to have some pressure on the according actors so they do their job correctly. Reading about that judge made the whole thing even more bizarre. There's someone judging people without having their identity confirmed properly first? WTF?
Edit: I had a similar experience lately with my ISP. Okay, in that case, I get that it can happen - and funnily enough, I haven't talked to a single boneheaded person while dealing with this. But in a justice system? No way!
Having to admit guilty when you didn't do it? What kind of system is that? Sounds like you are guilty until proven innocent in that case... instead of the other way around.
"Presumed innocent" means that at the _end_ of the trial, if the prosecution has not made their case then you are free. But in the time between being charged and the end of your trial you are not innocent. The court will suspend or revoke your license until after trial, you'll have all the charges on your record until after trial, and you can be held in prison until the trial is resolved. In all these cases, you will probably not get any compensation when it turns out that you were innocent, and meanwhile you may have been fired from work and had your property confiscated for non-payment of bills.
Because let's be honest, there's precious little to motivate for law enforcement, prosecutors and judges to actually process your case quickly; and indeed there are various incentives to convict possibly innocent parties. Similarly; there are virtually no incentives for law enforcement to do no harm; nor are there any meaningful protections against abuse of power. It is more common for police to do the punishing than courts at this point - which begs the question whether the very existence of a criminal court doesn't do more harm than good at this point; for by having such a facade of impartiality it becomes much easier to excuse lack of oversight, accountability and proportionality on the enforcement side.
Sure; it could be even worse. But is it too much to ask for at least some kind of self-corrective measure to be built into the system?
Hell I did it and i'm white middle class, but I was actually guilty too so...
Probably what they did was legal, but even if not it would be the work of months or years and many thousands of dollars to get any kind of compensation.
In addition, driving in the US is a privilege rather than a right, so despite the fact that the majority of the US needs to drive to work, the burden of proof for revoking or suspending a drivers license is relatively low.
This happens all the time.
All the technical problems are already solved, but as usual, it's politics and people and profit standing in the way
> She didn’t have the Facebook Messenger app; she’d never seen my messages.
For goodness sake, fix this. This is a HUGE UX BUG in facebook.
I've gotten plenty of important "hidden" messages from people through facebook.
Don't let people send messages if you aren't going to show them to the receiver. This is a huge problem.
I don't even know what to do about this - deleting my FB account might stop people from doing this, but it's far from guaranteed and any test I run now will be invalid as soon as the UX changes again.
A few years back I was cleaning up my Facebook account and I stumbled across all of my received messages (mail? Not the same thing as Messenger). I was surprised because there were hundreds of them and I had never seen any of them before. People had responded to my marketplace listings, wanted to get lunch, asked about my pages, accepted an interview application, all kind of useful things hidden away from my view for half a decade.
The UI didn’t make it very prominent and I learned about the Others folder only when I read an article about how someone missed appointments for job applications, invitations and messages from acquaintances because Facebook sorted these messages into the Others folder. Back then this happened quietly, without notification of the user. I checked my Others folder and found years old messages. Insane. All the missed opportunities and trouble that was caused for millions of people because Facebook intervened in their communication.
I think Facebook now at least informs the user if they received a message from a non-friended person. Took them a long time.
This is a serious question. I was not trying to be snarky, just trying to determine just how different things are if you are, say, a young black guy breaking a minor rule like that. I know the consequences are definitely different in Chicago if you are black, but I was wondering if things are better in other places in the US.
(Given the contents of the article, I realize NYC is similar to Chicago, I guess I was assuming you live in another area of the country?)
Exactly. If you are white, then this seems to support the parent comment's statement.
If they weren't such, they probably wouldn't have gotten off with warnings and both them and their parents would have had quite a tiff that would have actually gotten something productive done as a result.
That seems excessively broad. Aren't prostitution and drug use already illegal?
I have a photo of a sign in New Orleans forbidding this, and forbidding sleeping.
I was amazed at the number of signs showing what was forbidden in public spaces in the USA when I visited. It didn't square with my expectations of "the Land of the Free".
On the one hand, if the laws do indeed vary, then the signs make some sense. But there were signs forbidding things like "lewd conduct and public masturbation", or "public defecation", which I assume are generally forbidden.
It felt like someone thought I needed instructions on how to use a park.
some people do
>unleashed dogs >public inebriation >public brawling >shoplifting
in their communities? This is the standard we hold ourselves to in the United States of America. Also see Singapore where you can be caned for spitting gum on the sidewalk.
I've never been tempted to do any of these things, and crazy thing, I've never gotten a ticket for any of them.
Is it inconvenient to walk around the park? Sure it is. Should people plan for that, knowing about it? Probably. Do people do so? Usually not. Same thing with jaywalking. It isn't the same as "how dare people walk across a street".
They're free to walk across the street - just do so at the cross walk. Likewise, they're free to walk around after 10pm - just not in the park.
The tickets from people ignoring signs is also additional revenue to the town/state so there is some financial motivation to not spend money on a gate (and staff responsible for locking/opening the gate).
No lawyer would take the case either. He eventually went to an identity theft company, who took $400 and fixed the issue in three months.
I use to work in Identity Management at a major university. A number of people came through our systems without SSNs. We had a complicated set of rules to make sure we didn't provision two accounts. We'd check if the names were reversed and we'd check both the month/date = date/month on the date of birth (people from other countries might enter it backwards without thinking about it). We even had rules for SSNs that were off by <2 digits with similar names. Every morning we'd have a set of "manual provisions" we'd have to stop and check.
Occasionally duplicate accounts get created and we'd have to go through a big manual process of combining them and telling them "You need to use this account; forget about the other one. It no longer exists," and get their stuff synced across all AD domains (Universities typically have several).
What surprises me about this article is the NYC system doesn't use the SSN (which is good in a sense, it should never be used as a identification number, see the latest GCP Greg: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erp8IAUouus).
The idea of an identity and criminal record us that follows us digitally is a very new concept, one that didn't exist 150+ years ago; or at least no where near the complexity it does today. Immigration was also treated very differently. Most of are criminal background procedures in the US are plagued with problems like this; which is why most counties require fingerprint/criminal checks for immigration screenings.
Today, the idea of a national identification number is highly opposed in the United States. In some ways I favour this as I feel digital identities lead to a situation where people cannot escape their pasts. But it also means people use absolutely terrible ways to associate people such as name and birthday; totally non-unique fields that should never be used to identify people. SSNs offer no real security; no photos and your number +1/-1 is most likely a valid SSN of someone who was born the same day as you.
people from other countries might enter it correctly without thinking about it
Frankly I'm surprised that we didn't use big endian for x86.
More like: "Let's pioneer this field." Later: "Sure there are international standards now, but we won't change how we do things because money."
But the pioneering argument doesn't apply to everything. Every country or area inside countries had their own units of measurement for basic stuff like mass of things, weight of food, volume of cups, length of poles, exactly like every city had its own time before time zones. There is no pioneering in the size and weight of containers for wheat. It's stuff people have been doing since before writing.
Basically every country standardized most units but the USA didn't. I think that having the larger economy in the world played a role in that. There are no incentives to adapt when the rest of the world will build a slightly different size of everything only for the US market.
[1] Check this conversion table for gas pipes http://www.azzistudio.it/tavola.html and notice the weird values for the metric sizes (millimeters). Nobody would build pipes with those diameters if they started metric centuries ago.
A pint of beer or cider in Britain is 568mL, in the USA 473mL, but everything else in a British bar is sold in metric units. And today is "the third of April", 3/4/2016.
You've also written it in "outer right hand side of a ledger" notation instead of the more correct ISO-8601
https://xkcd.com/1179/ (ISO 8601)
Official forms in Britain (and most of Europe) use the leading zeros, DD/MM/YYYY, though the separator can be / - . or a mixture.
Never the less, the one true date format is ISO 8601, and it should be used everywhere there isn't a clear and over-riding reason to use another format.
From the Midwest, USA and I'd would always refer to the date in the first way (and subsequently, it is logical to write the date in month/day format).
Still agree that day/month/year makes more sense.
The latter. "April fourth" would sound very odd in a British accent.
Example with lots of written dates: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/29/article-50-brexit... (but I could equally choose a formal document, like my birth certificate, or something very informal, like a handwritten note).
When spoken, the "of" is always included, and the number is always an ordinal (-th etc).
And year/month/day/hour/minute/second is best as its largest to smallest and if you name your documents / fields in this format it sorts better.
Checkuary is the unofficial 13th month of every year. It lasts until you remember to write the correct year number on all of your checks.
As an American, I write it as 3Apr2017 to avoid ambiguity. I can't stand how the traditional all-numeric date format is neither big-endian nor little-endian.
My current British bank account didn't come with a cheque book, but the one I had when I was a student did. So probably 2009 or so; maybe one or two per year before that.
As in a home loan deposit are an outright house purchase?
In Australia when I did this it was done via a different kind of cheque, I forget what it was called because I haven't used one before or since, but I had to the bank in person to get it.
The only other time I've used a check in the recent past has been to void one for direct deposit at an employer.
I wish there was a way around both of these - I hate writing checks.
When you use your bank to pay a bill on-line, unless it's a major utility that worked with your bank to setup an ACH payment means, the bank will typically still print a paper check and send it to its destination.
We have electronic transfer (ACH) using the bank (ABA or routing number) and account number, but it's not available to regular people. People often keep these two numbers secrete to prevent identity theft.
Most other countries, you put your friends bank num, account num and name and it will show up in their account the very next day (even on holidays!) for free. In the US, you have to use 3rd party payment systems like PayPal, which charge fees and don't really do bank-to-bank transfers.
(The UK system guarantees two hours, but it's usually seconds.)
You can also use a mobile phone number instead of knowing the bank account numbers. This is extremely common in Denmark, including for purchases; the same system exists in the UK but it is less often used.
What's a "check"?
From Stan Mazor's 1995 survey article "The History of the microcomputer - Invention and Evolution" from Proceedings of the IEEE, pp. 1601-1607, Dec. 1995,
A. Little Endian
Some have wondered why the addresses in the 8008 were
stored "backward" with the little end first, e.g., the low
order byte of a two byte address is stored in the lower
addressed memory location. I (regrettably) specified this
ordering as part of the JUMP instruction format in the spirit
of compatibility with the Datapoint 2200. Recall that their
original processor was bit serial; the addresses would be
stored low to high bit in the machine code (bit backward).
Other computer makers organize the addresses with the "big
end" first. The lack of standardization has been a problem
in the industry.Just don't use it for any kind of authentication, ever, because it's not a secret. Also, add a checksum to avoid typos.
When I was young there was privacy. Believe it or not, you could start a new life somewhere else if you wished, and leave the old one behind, without any great effort. Move and get an unlisted number and you might as well have vanished from the face of the earth. Freedom as I knew it then required privacy, these were not concepts that could be separated.
I'm not sure what the West means by freedom now; since I'm no longer in a practical sense free to do so much that I was once free to do, without scrutiny. No doubt crime rates are down as a result; but reducing crime wasn't the purpose of freedom. Of course, it would take real effort to maintain privacy in a digital world. I think the time will come when we make that effort.
It was nobody's job to fix it.
I was a 19yo, freshly back to the US from Germany (I had been there since I was 11) and suddenly found I was unable to obtain any sort of credit (like getting a phone, electricity, an apartment etc.)
Everyone involved could easily see what happened. And no one could fix it.
After much amateur sleuth-work, I came to find that the person had the exact same name and birth date, and the hospital had messed up the insurance lookup.
Of course, when I called the hospital to resolve the situation, and provided a copy of my license to prove my identity, they admitted they made a mistake.
And two weeks later, they used to the address from my license to send me the hospital bill.
"Two weeks later they used the address from my license to illegally send me someone else's PHI."
If calling the hospital and asking to talk to someone "Because you sent me someone else's medical information" doesn't get their attention, ask them about their breach notification procedures.
edit: phrasing
And that's the lesson here. Customer support representatives are so far removed from positions where they can actually be helpful, that all they are able to provide anymore is apathy and canned responses.
Assuming that their training is worth anything at all, getting a supervisor and saying "I believe there's been a HIPAA violation and I need to know who to talk to" should get IMMEDIATE attention - it goes beyond application of a clue-by-four and should immediately get you connected to their Compliance Officer. That person should have all sorts of motivation to get things straightened out so it's not an ongoing breach with further disclosures post-notification.
The other kicker is that I believe the rules changed recently such that if an individual reports a breach and it results in fines, that individual may now receive part of the penalty amount (caveat: I didn't find a citation for this, just have heard it discussed somewhere). My guess is that in your case with a matching name it's unlikely that there'd be anything like that, but just the prospect of the headaches involved should motivate people to resolve the situation.
For traffic infractions, probably not.
> I had never been to any other kind of court except traffic court (at which, both times, the police officers had flat-out lied).
Reading into that it sounds like they had name, birthday, and the issuing officer saying, "yes, that was her".
If the officers can't reliably witness they shouldn't be a part of the process. There should be enough records taken at the time of the ticket that the officers unreliable testimony shouldn't be needed or used.
The motives for such are pretty easy to see in her story. "In 2015, I failed a background check for a new job because, according to the NYPD, I hadn’t paid the ticket 'I' had gotten for walking in a park in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn after hours, at 10pm. Now there was a misdemeanor on my record, and I had 60 days to clear it up if I wanted to keep the job, which meant trekking to lower Manhattan to criminal court. ...I tried to explain the long history of mix-ups, but the judge wouldn’t listen. He told me I’d have to go to trial, which could take months. By that time the job would be long gone. ...The cop told me to go back in and plead guilty, and then I’d pay a fine and the judge would dismiss the charge and let me off with a warning."
She believed the costs to pleading guilty would be lower than fighting the charge.
But this often holds true for even major crimes.
Plea guilty: Get 90 day suspended sentence, pay fines of $1000.
Fight case: Chance of 10 years in prison, pay $10,000 to lawyer guaranteed, chance of fines of $10,000.
Add in a prosecutor who is fighting dirty, which would you pick?
The problem is that trumped up charges, being offered significantly reduced plea deals, the cost of fighting the charges, and how awful public defenders are (regardless of fault) all combine into a nightmare where very few are willing to demand their right to trial.
To me the simplest solution is to end plea deals because they are effectively a punishment for insisting on a right. Cutting the sentence by 90% if someones takes a plea is the same as increasing a sentence by 1000% if someone demands on their right to a trial. This should not be allowed.
The only argument I've seen for plea deals is that they save time and money. Which I'm sure is true, but is that really sufficient reason to mess with people's right to a trial?
In this situation, having lots of plea deals predisposes the system to increase sentences for cases which go to trial, in order to get more plea deals. If every single person gets the harsher "trial" punishment, then there will be pressure to make the punishment fit the crime. When only 6% of people get that one, and 94% get a lighter sentence due to a plea deal, the "trial" punishment can be way worse.
For a really obvious and somewhat contrived example of how more options isn't necessarily a good thing, imagine if you could get a discount on your taxes if you agreed never to criticize the government. You don't have to take that choice, and you lose nothing by having it available, but I think most of us would see that program as a really bad thing.
Ah ok. The problem is not the deal itself, but that the system's goal then lead to utilize the deal in negative ways.
The American system is clearly not serving justice, as we saw in the Swartz case. The gulf between plea deals and sentences at trial can only be explained by an intention to coerce innocent men into pleading guilty.
A functional court system transfers money from society as a whole to fund the necessary punishment of individuals. Each action is a financial loss so its not incentivized to pursue them unless society as a whole benefits enough to justify the cost of the system.
A dysfunctional system derives monetary gain from persecuting individuals and thus is incentivized to do so even if society doesn't benefit and in fact even if they aren't guilty. This is exactly what you see in this story.
Further people faced with life destroying circumstances aren't rational actors they can be easy to manipulate into a plea with sufficient threats. Having a trial especially in serious matters ensures justice has at least a chance to be done.
never heard about this in Europe that people would be admitting guilt for something they haven't done
Even if you figure on a 1-in-1000 chance of being wrongly convicted it is probably not worth the risk of having a criminal charge on your record.
I have a number of friends who have done so; the funny thing is even the for ones who had done something wrong, they had not done the thing they plead to.
(most strangely is someone who was ticketed for reckless driving, fought it and took a deal for a noise violation; it was the same fine, but no points on the license; their car was definitely not too loud).
Yes, the federal government was doing this. It was all kinds of fun.
(For once in my life, I am grateful for my weird ass name.)
At some point, you have to ask yourself whether continuing down the same road is going to become a net loss in your life, and make the change to prevent that. That's part of being an adult. While it isn't her fault that this is happening, and it would be unfair to her that she should have to change her name to fix it, it would be the best and quickest way to prevent this issue in the future.
Especially why there are warrants and other things going on which could lead to permanent life-altering events (for instance, what if in the future one of these Lisa's is wanted for murder, or something else, that sends a boatload of SWAT agents to her door in the middle of the night?). Heck, what if her new friend dies, or has something else major happen to her, and the records get mixed?
With such possibilities, I know I wouldn't think twice about getting my name changed.
Also cannibalism.
I'm in, but do note that companies can't even get a email field that works correctly ("thanks for the regex, SO!"). No way more than 50% of websites as written can handle a string containing numbers and $DEITY only knows what.
What must it be like to be on the receiving end of such paternalism? It sounds awful. And horrifically damaging. If people tell you every day that you can't win, and you have no responsibility for bad decisions you make, how can you possibly succeed after such a psych-war campaign to make you into a control-externalizing mental infant? I'd hate my parents forever if they did this to me.
She meets her black name-sharer who reveals that she is, surprise, a single mother with three kids (who she bore very young), while the author stayed married and had kids late. News flash: Blacks who simply wait to have kids and have them when married and stay married are overwhelmingly not in poverty. Meanwhile, whites who fail to do these things are very often in poverty. No racist white person is forcing anyone to have kids in their teenage years, from multiple men, and fail to marry. These are personal decisions, and bad decisions have bad consequences for people of any race.
And then they sit around talking about "the utter ridiculousness of upper-middle-class white people". Yes, so ridiculous, not having kids out of wedlock, and forming stable social arrangements.
And "the intense differences between Brownsville and Park Slope, very different Brooklyn neighborhoods but both suffering from a severe lack of diversity.". Yes, I'm sure those white neighborhoods are really "suffering" because there are too many whites. Must be a nightmare.
She literally calls it a "version of justice" when black people give false information to police to avoid tickets for public violence: "Now I understood why the tickets were never paid: most of these Lisa Davises had, in some way, disappeared. They had given fake addresses or moved, and they were skirting the law – their own version of justice – however they could."
Yes, there is racism against blacks. No, that doesn't mean black are morally-perfect shining hearts of goodness whose every action is perfect. People are people; the way this author wipes away the individual to make everyone simply a piece of their group, the way she excuses any action from someone in a victim class, is kind of horrifying. And it is racism.
Agree--the whole article has a very bizarre "I got a new pet, and sometimes she pees on the rug, but she's just a puppy!" feeling.
Reading between the lines, "suffering from a lack of diversity" really means that it's a monoculture, and that this is not good for the city.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rasheena-fountain/black-single...
So, basically if you think single motherhood as a phenomenon is a social problem, in her mind, you are blaming single mothers. I never understand this kind of mind-twisting.
This article blows my mind. At no point did she consider that these people could actually be responsible for their actions and that what was happening to her was the result of someone repeatedly violating the law and refusing to deal with the consequences. The real problem here is obviously the incredibly flawed use of name + DOB as a unique identifier, but the author doesn't focus on that and instead delivers what really feels like a racist lecture about how this entire situation is the result of some kind of systemic injustice against a whole group of people just for the color of their skin.
Is "paternalism" in this case a euphemism for centuries of slavery, legal segregation, and general racism? Because, yes, that can be horrifically damaging to people.
Even if she prevailed, there's no guarantee that the problem would be fixed in a reasonable time frame, or at all.
I could change my name for ~$100, new passport and license costs, and an aggravating amount of paperwork.
I could convince the New York DMV to fix their record-keeping by... well, maybe if I convinced an influential politician to shame them for it. Maybe. I suppose I could devote years of my life to a public campaign about the issue. There's a chance that would work, though probably they'd just fix my file to shut me up and not fix the system.
If your point is that this is insane, then yes, yes it is. But changing your name is almost certainly easier than convincing a large, high-bureaucracy state DMV to solve the problems they cause.
It seems that their records are keyed off of ONLY:
* Birthdate
* Last Name
* First name
04 bits = Middle initial (It's actually 5, but I imagine the common ones cluster)
10 bits = First Name
10 bits = Last Name
120 bits = 42 adult years (12*10): 3-years ~=1024 slots ~= 10 bits
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
The sets are larger, but even with the addition of those extra 4 bits there's still going to be overlap in a non-trivial population.
When is there a "good" chance of a match in all of the fields that matter? What is a "good" chance? What is an acceptable collision?
I think most sane people would agree that the final question is the important one. In matters that can derail someone's life and send them to jail an acceptable false positive rate is ZERO. Therefore answering the preceding questions is largely meaningless, we already have example proof of at least one failure, which is enough to declare the system inherently broken.
That makes the birthday paradox / problem a LOT worse as well.
But, even outside of official records, I often wonder how many issues there are these days where someone with a relatively unusual name happens to share that name with someone with a prominent web profile. And that person could plausibly be them (for reasons of age, location, occupation) and have some background that would give potential employers, dates, etc. serious pause.
In pre-web days, I knew someone in NYC who shared a name with someone who was notorious (and widely hated) in New York sports circles. My acquaintance literally got death threats on his home answering machine.
Countries way smaller than that did it.
I'm not sure I even disagree. Even if the practical effect (for good or ill) is negligible in most cases, it starts to tread a bit too close to "your papers please" and standardized tracking across all systems. Some inefficiency and ambiguity isn't always a bad thing.
Just read comments here. Many people had similar stories.
My name is quite unique, and people are not sure what is middle name, and what is last name. So often they cannot find my file and sometimes they create a new file, so they believe I am multiple persons. Well, at least I think that is what my health care insurance is doing. My employer pays 600€/month to them, the insurance sends me newsletter snailmail every month, and when I go to the doctor, the insurance says I am not insured with them, they have no records about me; or that the insurance had not been paid for months; or they send me a e-mail that cannot send me letters, because they do not have my physical address ...
It's a small world. And even worse if you have common names.
> I had to plead guilty and pay the fine to restore my license
No she didn't, forcing the court to investigate its own ineptitude rather than accept guilt is exactly what our system is for. Even a public defender would have stood a good chance at spotting this.
Or when she was shown the other address, she should have recorded it and sent a letter or visited the other person. They could have cleared this up much earlier then the time 4 elections take.
This is like standing in the crosswalk screaming at the cars that you have right-of-way. Truth, Justice, The American Way, Honor, Beauty and everything else may be on your side, but that bumper at 30MPH is still going to hurt like hell.
This is literally what people do where I live. I once saw a guy stop walking in the middle of the street and flip the bird to a driver who didn't seem to be slowing down. I almost had a heart attack when I thought I was about to see the pedestrian get plastered, but the driver swerved to the other lane and drove past him. Then the pedestrian yelled "fuck you!" after him.
I haven't seen anyone get hit yet, but I feel it's bound to happen one of these days. The pedestrians around here are insane. It's amazing what they'll do just because they have the legal right of way.
Sometimes standing up for your rights looks like insanity to an observer.
I once crossed a crosswalk at a 4-way stop. A car started accelerating from their stop sign. I could have kept walking to "stand up for my rights," but I chose to stop walking just in case the car wasn't going to stop.
Turns out the driver was a slightly older guy who didn't see me at all. He blew right passed me (within a foot of where I stopped), saw me out his driver's window, and slammed on the breaks. If I hadn't stopped, I'd have been hit hard. It's true he would have been the one at fault, but that's hardly some victory. He was a bad driver, not someone purposefully ignoring my right of way.
Forget pedestrians; this is why driving schools teach so-called defensive driving style. Even if you're legally faultless, it's much better to avoid an accident than to put yourself in danger just because you have the "right" to do it. Do you know how many accidents you could cause every day by ignoring safety when you have right-of-way? Standing up for your rights is hardly an excuse to plow into every car that pulls out in front of you.
Driving on a suspended license was not the only choice, rides, public transport, or even simply requesting a close court date. She might even have been able to get some kind of special waiver, until it was sorted out, by taking the time to try to sort it out.
Her choice to capitulate in the beginning caused her 20 years of misery and potential affecting her ability to vote. It also made it harder to fix because now there is a "proof" she drives unsafely, who knows what this did to her insurance rates.