2600 Flash
Computer Foul-Ups Hurt Social Security
A House Committee has asserted that improper handling of a $115 million computer contract had undermined the Government's ability to serve the millions of Americans who receive Social Security benefits.
The report that improprieties in the 1981 selection of the Paradyne Corporation, a Florida company, to build computer terminals had damaged the daily operations of the Social Security Administration came from the House Government Operations Committee after two years of investigation.
After Paradyne provided the terminals, field offices of the Social Security Administration experienced "extraordinary levels of equipment failures and poor performance" according to researchers.
The report cited complaints from local Social Security offices all over the country. "The public is frustrated with us and we're frustrated with the system and snapping at each other." wrote the Fayetteville, NC manager on July 9, 1982. "Something has to be done immediately. The public will be after us with guns and knives shortly."
Phones in the Sky
Last month, six airlines began a pay-telephone service that allows passengers to call anywhere in the United States. The cost is fairly phenomenal: $7.50 for the first three minutes and $1.25 for each additional minute.
The system (designed by Airfone Incorporated) uses radio waves to transmit calls to one of 37 ground receiving stations, which then transfer them to regular telephone lines.
To use the system, you insert anyone of seven major credit cards into a wall-mounted console situated in the front of the plane. When the card has been validated, a cordless phone will be released, and you can return to your seat to dial away.
Another FBI Computer File
An advisory panel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has approved the testing of a computerized file that could allow criminal justice agencies all over the country to exchange the names of white-collar crime suspects and their associates.
An FBI staff paper presented to the panel said the file, the Economic Crime Index, would permit a "more efficient and effective field-wide coordination of major white-collar crime investigations, particularly those involving financial crimes."
Civil liberties experts, however, immediately challenged the project, contending that the widespread exchange of "raw investigative files" would be a dangerous threat to innocent Americans. They said that such networks should be limited to handling public information such as a person's arrest record.
The information would include the names of suspects, their addresses, Social Security numbers, passport numbers, bank account numbers, aliases, Selective Service numbers, driver's license numbers, automobile license numbers, and information about "associates."
According to Jerry Berman, legislative counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union, the project "Is extraordinarily troublesome, because it is not intended to exchange public record information such as when someone is arrested or when an arrest warrant has been obtained for someone who is believed to have committed a crime. Instead, the FBI will be passing around information that will include many unproven allegations and casual gossip, the dissemination of which presents a major threat to the privacy of all Americans."
Berman noted that information available on the proposal did not define what was meant by white-collar crime or "an associate." He said, "An associate of a white-collar criminal might he a casual friend you met at a party or, in the case of a suspected bank officer, all the members of the bank's board of governors."
Use of Wiretaps at Record Pace
The use of wiretaps by federal law enforcement agencies has been steadily increasing, with a record number expected this year as the FBI becomes more involved with narcotics investigations, according to Justice Department sources.
American University law professor Herman Schwartz, who monitors the use of surveillance, thinks there are not enough safeguards in the use of wiretaps. "I think there is an enormous intrusion into people's privacy," he said, citing recent FBI public-corruption probes. "Now they are reaching into the lives of a number of innocent people because of the types of crimes they are going after." he said.
For each wiretap installed, an average of 1,107 conversations were overheard involving 147 persons, according to the 1983 court report. In that year, the cost of installing federal wiretaps averaged $65.000 each, for a total cost of more than $13 million. But critics claim that figure is too low because it doesn't calculate the legal work involved. All wiretaps have to be court-authorized.
The rapid increase in the number of wiretaps, which sources said already has topped last year's total of 208, probably will surpass the 1971 record (285) set by the Nixon administration. Use of wiretaps dropped soon after President Jimmy Carter took office, with an all-time low set in 1977. The use of electronic surveillance started to climb again in 1981 after President Ronald Reagan took office.
818 Here to Stay
After three years of warnings and nine months of what the telephone companies called a "permissive dialing period," 1.5 million Los Angeles area residents have been split off from 3.7 million neighbors as the area received its first new dialing code in nearly 40 years.
Callers to downtown Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Hollywood, and the trendy beach communities of Malibu and Santa Monica can continue to use the old 213 code. But anyone calling San Fernando Valley and the suburban San Gabriel Valley now have to dial 818.
Alfred Kness, a computer equipment salesman who was making rounds through the downtown area, pulled out a thick booklet full of clients business cards and said, "It's so exciting now. I never know who I'm going to reach on the first try a customer or that nice mechanical lady from the phone company. It stinks."
One We Somehow Missed
JANUARY 27, 1984 - Two 18-year-old Stony Point (New York) "rustlers" have been named as the outlaws who lassoed a Letchworth telephone booth to their car and dragged it two miles through the dust before being arrested by state troopers. Both of the accused were charged with grand larceny, possession of burglar tools, and criminal mischief.
A witness reported seeing two men tie up the outdoor booth at about 3:35 a.m., pull it from its moorings in a concrete slab and drag it along the highway. "They were tracked by following the scratch marks on the highway" a state policeman said.
The troopers found the booth a good two miles from its point of origin. A security officer from the New York Telephone Company said the booth cost $1,385, the coin machine $400, the wire that led out of it another $46, and the concrete slab it was pulled from was worth another $278. He said the machine, with an estimated $50 in change still in the coin box, was "totaled."
"We're going to be looking for restitution," the company representative said.
In Addition...
*) Attorney Melvin Belli has filed suit in Santa Ana, CA against TRW Inc., accusing the nation's largest credit rating firm of "dangerous and unethical" practices that exposed credit histories to computer pirates. This is the first of many similar lawsuits Belli intends to file nationwide.
*) MCI says its customers now can call Belgium, Argentina, Brazil, East Germany, Greece, and the United Arab Emirates. (Presumably, the MCI trademark, i.e. loud echoes, will continue to nourish with this expansion.) MCI has negotiated agreements that will allow the start of direct oversells phone service next year to England and three other (as of yet unnamed) foreign nations.
*) New York's chief judge has proposed having a computer help select guardians and conservators in an effort to combat the appearance that appointments may be handed out as political favors. Under the system, each time a judge needed to make an appointment, the computer would randomly select five names from which he could choose. The chief judge would establish statewide standards for placement of names on the list... Hackers, though, would probably bypass those standards.