You can slice this the other way also: using check-ins for a particular person to track where they visit. If their reported income is low, yet they check-in regularly at expensive restaurants and travel the globe, you've probably got a tax cheat in there somewhere or another.
Seriously, I have no idea why we discuss some of this stuff. It only serves to give ammo for other people to monitor and control us in ways they never have before.
I can see IRS building a fun little crawler. They already know everyone's name, address, place of employment, age, marital status, salary, the church they donate to. It would be interesting (and scary) to try to identify potential auditing target based on these check-ins and other stuff (from say, Facebook posts, twitter).
The tricky thing here, IMO, is that spending is based on assets + income, not just income. If I inherited $3m, make $50k/year, and spend $100k/year, it doesn't mean I'm lying about the $50k, it might just mean I have enough savings to live beyond what my income suggests.
"Seriously, I have no idea why we discuss some of this stuff."
There are times on HN when I laugh because people discuss things that could happen that in a practical sense stand little chance of happening. But they hang on the fact that it is possible the same way they might know someone who got ticketed for going 2 miles over the posted speed limit.
The IRS has (or had) a program called TCMP where they dissect everything on a tax return to see if it's kosher from many different angles. They will also see the "lifestyle" that you are leading and dig depending on that.
The IRS doesn't need foursquare to gather information to determine tax cheats they have other ways to do that if they wanted to. They could rely more on information on snitches or they could simply do a better job of correlating where someone lives with what they pay in taxes as a starting point (I believe they do some of this already but it's probably only at the zip code level). A good test for how they don't do this is to try and tip them off to someone who you think is cheating. Without hard evidence they won't do anything.
"check-in regularly at expensive restaurants and travel the globe"
You can buy some of this data in various forms the same way any marketer does. Or you can access property records. If someone has two houses and is reporting $20k in income that's a good place to start asking questions. You could then correlate it with what their reported income is as a starting point. From everything I've seen though the IRS doesn't operate that way.
We have to remember that our set of laws was designed with a huge amount of slack. You can have a speed limit that nobody follows because hardly anybody gets caught. Once you start catching everybody, you've changed the social dynamic just by following the rules more strictly.
This kind of thing is a huge deal. For decades politicians have spit-balled new laws that, even though passed, don't amount to squat because nobody can figure them out or enforce them.
The more we automate this stuff the more miserable all of our lives will be. This kind of thing is not good at all. Can emphasize enough how these technological developments are a terrible evil (and I love technology)
There is a differentiation here that needs to be made. There is a problem if laws are so complicated and so strict and everyone ends up breaking them, the problem becomes a serious problem once the government has the ability to collect and record all times someone broke the law and then decide, later, for some possibly unrelated reason, to selectively enforce it.
Then a history of law breakage can be use for blackmail, threats, for silencing for coercing.
You are caught at an Occupy event and booked in. You are taken to the station and they pull up the fact that a speed camera caught you going 20 mph over speed limit. "5 years ago, it looks like IRS detected a tax discrepancy in your reporting, it would be a shame if they started an audit...maybe you should stop being involved in this movement", stuff like that.
I would almost more surprised if it won't happen sometime in the near future than if it does happen.
This trend is extremely dangerous. I could not agree more.
There's the massive intelligence collection and physical detection effort against terrorists.
There's been a more constrained system of criminal and criminal activity detection and correlation using GPS tracking, phone surveillance, drones, license plate recognition, and data mining of government and commercial databases.
The two are merging. Soon, everyone will be terrified of free speech and free association. Speech may still be free, but the government can always find some law you're violating.
As Breyer noted in his dissent in favor of granting cert in Rubin v. United States [1], "the complexity of modern federal criminal law... make it difficult for anyone to know in advance just when a particular set of statements might later appear... to be relevant to some such investigation." Even if you're guilty of no crimes and you have good lawyers, is participating in some political activity worth getting charged and brought to court?
Yes. What'll happen is that since there is a practical limit on the number of people the government can put in prison, they'll just "defer" huge amounts of crime for people as long as they stay on good behavior.
Then, when the government chooses, they'll let the entire bomb drop on the guy. Of course there's also the blackmail and coercion potential (Looking at these traffic and land-use violations, you really don't want to criticize the governor in that way, do you?) It used to be that whichever party won the White House, the next year all the NGOs that supported the other party would be due for a tax audit. This increases that kind of thing by several orders of magnitude.
We voted for politicians who made promises and changes based on an existing manual system. All of those hundreds of years of voting and changing were inside of a system that doesn't exist any more. The feedback loop of the democracy was based on real humans going out there and enforcing the laws against real other humans, not the idea that whatever was said would automatically magically happen. Tom Smith in 1880 could get elected mayor on a platform of prohibiting spitting on the sidewalk because we all knew Tom, and we all knew that the entire purpose of the law was Joe, proliferate sidewalk spitter. Nobody cared about that law because once Tom got elected, he made Joe stop spitting and that was that. And who cared if it stayed on the books for the next 130 years?
But the world where laws were made by people, for people, to be enforced against people doesn't exist any more. Now we have technology that can take pictures all day long of people spitting, do facial recognition, and add it to a little file somewhere.
It's almost like we need to completely start over. We've built a machine that never could work, so it has all these patches and over-engineered pieces. Now that we're actually getting it to work, it'll eat us alive.
Comments
You can slice this the other way also: using check-ins for a particular person to track where they visit. If their reported income is low, yet they check-in regularly at expensive restaurants and travel the globe, you've probably got a tax cheat in there somewhere or another.
Seriously, I have no idea why we discuss some of this stuff. It only serves to give ammo for other people to monitor and control us in ways they never have before.
I can see IRS building a fun little crawler. They already know everyone's name, address, place of employment, age, marital status, salary, the church they donate to. It would be interesting (and scary) to try to identify potential auditing target based on these check-ins and other stuff (from say, Facebook posts, twitter).
The tricky thing here, IMO, is that spending is based on assets + income, not just income. If I inherited $3m, make $50k/year, and spend $100k/year, it doesn't mean I'm lying about the $50k, it might just mean I have enough savings to live beyond what my income suggests.
"Seriously, I have no idea why we discuss some of this stuff."
There are times on HN when I laugh because people discuss things that could happen that in a practical sense stand little chance of happening. But they hang on the fact that it is possible the same way they might know someone who got ticketed for going 2 miles over the posted speed limit.
The IRS has (or had) a program called TCMP where they dissect everything on a tax return to see if it's kosher from many different angles. They will also see the "lifestyle" that you are leading and dig depending on that.
The IRS doesn't need foursquare to gather information to determine tax cheats they have other ways to do that if they wanted to. They could rely more on information on snitches or they could simply do a better job of correlating where someone lives with what they pay in taxes as a starting point (I believe they do some of this already but it's probably only at the zip code level). A good test for how they don't do this is to try and tip them off to someone who you think is cheating. Without hard evidence they won't do anything.
"check-in regularly at expensive restaurants and travel the globe"
You can buy some of this data in various forms the same way any marketer does. Or you can access property records. If someone has two houses and is reporting $20k in income that's a good place to start asking questions. You could then correlate it with what their reported income is as a starting point. From everything I've seen though the IRS doesn't operate that way.
I had the same reaction, this stuff makes me queasy.
I don't like tax cheats, but a tax cheat isn't going to imprison me for having the wrong opinions.
We have to remember that our set of laws was designed with a huge amount of slack. You can have a speed limit that nobody follows because hardly anybody gets caught. Once you start catching everybody, you've changed the social dynamic just by following the rules more strictly.
This kind of thing is a huge deal. For decades politicians have spit-balled new laws that, even though passed, don't amount to squat because nobody can figure them out or enforce them.
The more we automate this stuff the more miserable all of our lives will be. This kind of thing is not good at all. Can emphasize enough how these technological developments are a terrible evil (and I love technology)
There is a differentiation here that needs to be made. There is a problem if laws are so complicated and so strict and everyone ends up breaking them, the problem becomes a serious problem once the government has the ability to collect and record all times someone broke the law and then decide, later, for some possibly unrelated reason, to selectively enforce it.
Then a history of law breakage can be use for blackmail, threats, for silencing for coercing.
You are caught at an Occupy event and booked in. You are taken to the station and they pull up the fact that a speed camera caught you going 20 mph over speed limit. "5 years ago, it looks like IRS detected a tax discrepancy in your reporting, it would be a shame if they started an audit...maybe you should stop being involved in this movement", stuff like that.
I would almost more surprised if it won't happen sometime in the near future than if it does happen.
This trend is extremely dangerous. I could not agree more.
There's the massive intelligence collection and physical detection effort against terrorists.
There's been a more constrained system of criminal and criminal activity detection and correlation using GPS tracking, phone surveillance, drones, license plate recognition, and data mining of government and commercial databases.
The two are merging. Soon, everyone will be terrified of free speech and free association. Speech may still be free, but the government can always find some law you're violating.
As Breyer noted in his dissent in favor of granting cert in Rubin v. United States [1], "the complexity of modern federal criminal law... make it difficult for anyone to know in advance just when a particular set of statements might later appear... to be relevant to some such investigation." Even if you're guilty of no crimes and you have good lawyers, is participating in some political activity worth getting charged and brought to court?
[1] http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/98-93.ZD.html
Yes. What'll happen is that since there is a practical limit on the number of people the government can put in prison, they'll just "defer" huge amounts of crime for people as long as they stay on good behavior.
Then, when the government chooses, they'll let the entire bomb drop on the guy. Of course there's also the blackmail and coercion potential (Looking at these traffic and land-use violations, you really don't want to criticize the governor in that way, do you?) It used to be that whichever party won the White House, the next year all the NGOs that supported the other party would be due for a tax audit. This increases that kind of thing by several orders of magnitude.
We voted for politicians who made promises and changes based on an existing manual system. All of those hundreds of years of voting and changing were inside of a system that doesn't exist any more. The feedback loop of the democracy was based on real humans going out there and enforcing the laws against real other humans, not the idea that whatever was said would automatically magically happen. Tom Smith in 1880 could get elected mayor on a platform of prohibiting spitting on the sidewalk because we all knew Tom, and we all knew that the entire purpose of the law was Joe, proliferate sidewalk spitter. Nobody cared about that law because once Tom got elected, he made Joe stop spitting and that was that. And who cared if it stayed on the books for the next 130 years?
But the world where laws were made by people, for people, to be enforced against people doesn't exist any more. Now we have technology that can take pictures all day long of people spitting, do facial recognition, and add it to a little file somewhere.
It's almost like we need to completely start over. We've built a machine that never could work, so it has all these patches and over-engineered pieces. Now that we're actually getting it to work, it'll eat us alive.