Chris forwarded this to me: Steve Bellovin, nice guy, drinking buddy, all-round good egg, baritone Tom Lehrer singer, and inventor of so many pieces of TCP/IP and crypto technology that I feel it incumbent to point out that he wrote Anews just for karmic balance – well Steve’s got himself a blog and writes thusly:

Paul was robbed of his laptop at gunpoint. The story might end there, except that a few days later, a girl called him to ask for his password: “We’re from Microsoft; we’ve recovered your laptop, but we need your password to verify your ownership”. Paul said he wasn’t comfortable giving it out over the phone. She asked if he’d email it to her; he agreed, so she supplied her Yahoo! Mail address.

Naturally, Paul called the police with that information. They thanked him, but said there was nothing they could do with it Paul, however, knew rather more about the Internet. Since the caller had sounded rather young, he went to myspace and searched for that email address. He found her page; however, it was marked private, so he couldn’t read it. But he searched for her myspace name on Google to find her friends. That was very productive; aside from a picture of one of her friends with a gun, another friend provided her own picture and precise birthdate and time, as part of her horoscope… This was enough for the police, though emailing the information to them was a bit problematic: the robbery squad — in what should be one of the most tech-savvy large city police departments in the country — has a single email address on a fading ISP, and the detective had to look it up.

The rest of the story is ordinary police work….

Click the link to hear how it wraps up; what makes me aghast is the disjoint, somehow an e-mail address when you are at the grass-roots of law enforcement is not enough to warrant a warrant, but when you are messing around in big government there is a presumption that everything needs to be tracked.

It reminds me of the opening quotation cited in a Guy recent essay by Herbert:

My answer arises from a pub conversation a while back with the post-Marxist commentator Joe Kaplinsky. He maintains “they” don’t know what they want the information for, they are just collecting it just in case it should ever come in useful, because that’s what bureaucrats do.

…although Guy goes on to make a compelling case that that is not the whole story…