I'm at an intelligence community conference this week, and at one of the open sessions (press allowed in) this morning, the speaker talked about how the IC needs to work on networking better. He gave an example of how the FBI had asked some hotel chains for info, and the hotels said, "We'll have to talk to our legal department," and balked. But some of the local LEOs had made connections with hotel security staff who passed on the info--collected on their own, not through accessing corporate files, mind you--under the table. This was cited as a "success story" in connecting the dots and networking.

On the whole, the IC (at least the parts I deal with) is very aware of privacy issues and goes out of their way to avoid problems, but hearing someone promote something like that made me cough a couple of times.

I guess this one was a grey area of sorts; the hotel security guys had collected info on suspicious behavior and passed it on to friends, yet if they hadn't been in their positions they never would have been able to collect that info, either.

But having read the NY Times article on the feds wanting extra travel info on each and every airline reservation really made me think on this one.

The IC is all over the place on privacy. I couldn't believe the idiocy I saw there every day. In fact, this is one issue that I ended up leaving on.

I couldn't mention names in a report despite the fact that I "collected" that information from press releases and the company's website. Or even if I read it in a journal. That was "spying" and verboten. Didn't matter than everyone else and their dog in the world was talking about it. We had to talk around stuff to communicate the idea. Meanwhile, another part of the house is causing a ruckus that's a national controversy right now. But apparently, that was ok.

A lot of the networking that needs to happen in there is on the inside: within agencies and interagency. Information sharing is a joke. Sure, they pay lip service to it, but when it comes down to actually doing it, it doesn't happen. Not in a very efficient anyway.

I guess I can see how they're touting it as a success story. Really what they're looking for are informants, and they just happen to work at a hotel. The question is, what would the repercussions be if the company's legal department says they can't share info with them, but the staff is willingly giving it to the FBI. What kind of liability does that open them to? In this case, an employee could be seen as an agent of the company.

Super

Having had an identity theft issue as the result of a desk clerk at 2 top-line NYC hotels demanding and making a copy of my driver license upon check in, I am quite cautious and suspicious when any desk clerk asks for my ID. At the time, my DL had both the DL number and SSN.

This "desk associate" passed that info (along with my AmEx number) along to friends, who then opened a number of accounts and charged tens of thousands of dollars of stuff to my accounts. It took well over a year to clean up the mess. AmEx was good about it, but as best I can tell they declined to prosecute the folks that were caught in South Beach using the account.

Danger Will Robinson: be careful what you give to the $10/hour desk clerk at a hotel!!!