Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I went to the German consulate this morning and applied for a German passport. The process took less than ten minutes. While the German government website had told me to bring "original and one photocopy" of my birth certificate, marriage certificate, naturalization certificate, and American passport, the clerk made photocopies on their machine instead of using the photocopies I'd brought with me. They did use my photocopy of the application form, and I suspect that they wanted color copies. (As of a few days ago, our printer/copier is only good for black and white, having forgotten how to use the cyan ink.)

The clerk asked me whether I wanted to pick up my passport or have it mailed. I opted to pick it up rather than pay a fee to have it mailed, both to save a bit of money and so I don't have to worry about the passport being lost in the mail. (The round-trip subway fare is $4.80, versus I think $22 for having the passport mailed.) The clerk said that my passport should be ready in about six weeks. They will let me know when I can come pick it up, and I won't need an appointment, just show up any morning between 9 a.m. and noon.

It's a biometric passport, for which they scanned my index fingers. Interestingly, "Please bear in mind that due to privacy protection, the German Mission can only save the fingerprints for a brief period of time and will then delete them." I like the GDPR. My best guess about the fingerprint information is that it will be stored in some form built into the passport.

Under a new law, any large Russian blogging platform must keep records in Russia of everything published for the last six months. I would assume that this includes deleted posts or comments.

LiveJournal is definitely large enough to be covered by this, and I suspect it was written specifically with LJ in mind.

The law also bans bloggers from being anonymous; I don't know where that leaves people who haven't given LJ wallet names, traceable email addresses, etc.

If you aren't in or planning to visit Russia, this probably won't make much difference to you; I assume that the NSA, the British government, and so on can already get their hands on most of this if they want it.

Yesterday, we got a call from Andy Porter, who was looking for roadnotes's phone number to pass on medical bad news about her cousin Elliot. (cattitude actually answered the phone and spoke to him throughout.) Out of a sudden feeling of caution, I told Cattitude "Get his number, and I'll call Roadnotes and let her know he wants to talk to her." This confirmed what Cattitude had already been thinking about not giving him that information. I gather from what I overheard that Porter did not take this well, and actually got to the point of accusing Cattitude of paranoia for not wanting to give him someone's phone number, but he did reveal his own. The phone call ended quickly and with harsh words.

A moment later the phone rang again. It was a second call from Porter, with a question that is notable for both stupidity and intrusiveness, namely, "Why did redbird have her gall bladder removed?" Cattitude gave him one angry sentence, then hung up the phone again.

I then took the phone and tried to call Roadnotes, dialing from memory. "The number you have reached, 718-xxx-yyzz, is not in service…" Without thinking, I had entered the number from when she was living with volund. So if I had done the automatic thing, or given in to pressure, Porter would have assumed I was trying to blow him off. I then pulled up an address/phone number list, called her, and passed along such news as I'd been given, and the phone number. I also learned that I had been right about her not wanting him to have her phone number.

It's not paranoia to know that not everyone wants their phone number to be available to the whole world. Someone who is a long-time friend of L (whose name I am eliding here for her comfort), a woman who is careful about access to her own contact information, should be aware of that. That the accusation of paranoia came that fast suggests that it's his ready-to-hand way of pressuring people for information, which in turn suggests that he's run into this before and overrun boundaries, or tried to.

*sigh* Not that my EU-citizen friends need more reasons not to visit me here in New York:

In 2003, the EU made a secret agreement to share airline passenger data with the US Department of Homeland Security, although the US doesn't have privacy protections sufficient to satisfy European law. The DHS promised to use the data only to fight terrorism.

DHS then turned around and, in another secret agreement, gave the data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That Memorandum of Understanding promises that CDC will protect the data--data that DHS shouldn't have had by EU law, and shouldn't have shared according to its own previous agreement. In general, I'd rather trust CDC than DHS. I'm surer of their competence and their good intentions. In this case, it's not clear that they have any practical use for the data: names, nationalities, and whatever else is on those lists won't tell CDC "the passenger in 17F showed signs of X communicable disease," which is the sort of thing they might reasonably have a use for.

As the ACLU points out,

the U.S. government is distributing information that it explicitly promised it would not share. This is very troubling for several reasons.

First, it is continuing evidence that the American government, and especially its security establishment, does not take privacy and data protection seriously.

Second, it undermines the respect and credibility of our government when it makes promises as a result of careful negotiations among different stakeholders and then breaks those promises.

[Crossposting from my weblog.]