It was a hundred degrees outside, first of those squishy humid days here by the placid Potomac. Jiggs played golf down in southern Maryland- I didn’t attempt anything so rash after the Burger Bash in Rosslyn on Saturday. I contented myself with periodic plunges in the glittering blue waters of the pool where our Polish Lifeguard informed me that he had a monumental hangover.

It was a fun and chaotic day, between the Life guard’s misery, the high school graduation party on the patio Mary Margaret threw for a gal we have watched grow up in the building, the glittering cool waters of the pool and a series of high-octane vodka-based beverages with which I plied the adults at the party.

I sweated trough my aloha shirt and after a couple hours of hors d’oeuvres and drinks we all found ourselves in the pool, refreshed and ready for anything.

Which after all the heat and exercise and alcohol didn’t happen. I was asleep in my brown chair by eight; awake again at midnight reading some trashy thriller appropriate for the middle of a summer night.

I was corresponding this morning with some old friends who are in the same situation as me: out of airspeed and ideas. They are retiring, downsizing and moving to lower-cost areas. I would love to keep the farm, but I think less landscaping and maintenance in a single-level place is what I am going to try out when the time comes.

I also would consider the Redneck Riviera- I liked coastal Mississippi, and Key West was just about perfect, though it is expensive and at the end of a very long set of bridges. But the ferry to Cuba will be open soon enough on that, so there is a lot to look forward to in terms of viewing a worker’s paradise in person.

I have opened up the search aperture for where I might fetch up one of these days, since I think I should shop for a loan to buy a place while I can. You know I have been uneasy about the consequences of the disclosure of our personal information to the Chinese.

When last we visited the matter, the number of us in the Defense Establishment who had been comprehensively de-pantsed had soared to more than 22 million. Taken with the hundred-odd million whose information had been stolen by the health providers, it looks like the PRC has complete information on just about the entire 157 million of us in the civilian work force.

That makes me feel there is a draft in the nether regions, and I am in the midst of one of those dreams in which you find yourself addressing a hostile crowd sans culottes. It would be bad enough if it was only a hostile Communist Central Committee that had my Social Security number and credit card information, but it seems that Washington is interested in collecting even more data to inadvertently disclose to evil-doers.

I have been very curious about the establishment of the Orwellian-named Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which appears to be anything but that.

Judicial Watch announced this week that the CFPB has been energetically spending millions of dollars for the warrantless collection and analysis of all our non-cash financial transactions, which they cheerfully note may be shared with “additional government entities.”

I am hoping that doesn’t include OPM and Interior. So, in addition to the meta-data on all our phone calls already collected by NSA, we have CFPB Director Richard Cordray issuing contracts- the Government isn’t qualified to actually do any of this work, as we have seen- to the major credit reporting agencies and accounting firms to gather, store, and share credit card data. They want- no, better phrased, the ARE- tracking the daily consumer habits of “select individuals without their awareness or consent.”

The scheme is outlined pretty nicely in an IDIQ* contract solicitation from CFPB that seeks to “acquire and maintain a nationally representative panel of credit information on consumers for use in a wide range of policy research projects… The panel shall be a random sample of consumer credit files obtains from a national database of credit files.”

The initial targets of the panel will include five million consumers, and joint borrowers, co-signers, and authorized users [emphasis added]. The initial panel shall contain 10 years of historical data on a quarterly basis [emphasis added]. The initial sample shall be drawn from current records and historical data appended for that sample as well as additional samples during the intervening years [emphasis added] to make the combined sample representative at each point in time.

Account-level data will be collected without a warrant or National Security Letter. Because it is going to be good for us, I guess. It is only fair.

The Supreme Court just decided that the doctrine of “disparate impact” means that there doesn’t have to be actual evidence of intentional discrimination for there be recourse to legal action. It can be based on statistical analysis all by itself. This opens a Pandora’s box of great new opportunities for the government to direct us what to do, based on information they have collected from individuals without our permission.

I think we already tried this with the sub-prime loan bubble that almost brought down the global economy. Maybe we can succeed in actually doing it this time and stop messing around.
I liked Judicial Watch’s dance off:

“The administration’s warrantless collection of the private financial information of millions of Americans is mind-blowing. Is there anything that the Government thinks it can’t do?”

Or having collected it, give it away to anyone with a good hacking algorithm? Apparently not.

Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303

*IDIQ: Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity contract vehicle that provides great flexibility to the Government in obtaining goods and services.