Special Blog Post:
Cat and Mouse with the VA (Score One for the Cat)
The graphic below is the front of the envelope I
received several days ago from the Veterans Administration. The good people at
the VA wanted to deliver
to me some information to perhaps put my mind at ease about that theft last
month of tens of millions of veterans' records that were on a laptop some idiot
at the VA took home and
then unintentionally donated to a criminal.
![]()
Before I explain why I'm in a multi-day, grand rage, I should note that I am not upset about the data loss, itself. Pity the hapless crook who actually decides to steal and use my identity: he will find himself with a destroyed and irreparable credit rating, he will make less than $20,000 a year while whining about how unfair life is, and he will ultimately—perhaps imperceptibly until it's too late—become vexed of the physical attributes of the one from whom he stole the identity, said attributes including, but not restricted to, a crooked, bulbous nose, one eyelid that droops in a creepy way that makes people kind of not want to make eye contact for very long, and a vexatious hernia that has to be managed several times a day with a good, hard shove to get the guts to go back in, that push always producing a numbingly sickening "SQUIIIIK-GLURB" noise that makes fraternity boys say, "Dude!"
I shall return to the issue of data theft later in this article. Before that, however, I shall summarize an important feature of my life. This shouldn't take long, so bear with the story for its importance to the matter of the envelope above.
I was an adolescent when my father passed away after a protracted fight against lung cancer. During the course of his barbaric treatment, which included poisons injected into his body and radiation applied to him in doses that literally made his breath smoke when he came out of the Betatron room, Blue Shield sent a letter explaining that his medical benefits were all used up, so my parents were on their own to finish the miserable treatment that would cause him many more months of suffering before his merciful passing one late Sunday afternoon in April. Tens of thousands of dollars in debt, one of the two wage earners dead and the other being a woman, my mother and I were on the streets; and I mean that quite literally. We lived for a time in a big old station wagon, and we both worked several jobs. Over the next few years, we had a series of toilets the occasional landlords called apartments, but those never lasted too long before we didn't have the money for rent. We eventually ended up in an old, abandoned farmhouse that had been in the family for generations. No running water, but a good well and a cistern. The outhouse was appalling to smell, which finally gave me the motivation one hot Summer day to dig a new one. It was all very good, though, especially in retrospect because that was the last time I had a sense that someplace could be a permanent home.
The all night diner out by the big interstate was where we worked the graveyard shift. That was where my mother dropped to the floor one night, succumbing as she finally had to the creeping ravages of untreated diabetes. Doctors cost money, you see; and what exactly is it they're going to give you—eternal life? More likely, they'll give you their latest pharmaceutically wonderful, government-approved chemistry experiment. Oh, yes: they'll also give you a bill. But at least doctors are pretty good at pretending to care, I suppose.
Home was gone, so the road took me many places. After the Army, college beckoned once again. I went from one rooming house to another through the years of grad school. Never too long in one place, never a forwarding address.
I stopped getting mail from the VA by the mid-'80s. Actually, I never heard much from the VA, just from those stupid life insurance companies that told me I could have a low premium on a policy because of my veteran's status.
City to city I went after grad school, looking for teaching work wherever there were colleges. I found the entire concept of tenure ethically disgusting and professionally corrosive, so I certainly never had work for more than a few years in any given place before it was time to move on. That was fine by me: I had learned long before how to keep everything I owned down to a level where I could literally pack and move within maybe 10 minutes. Clothes should all fit in a single duffle bag. Books are for selling at the used books counter at the campus textbooks store; the ones I keep fit in a box along with some toys and old stuff I hold onto for continuity between the now and all the thens of my life. A big old leather bag holds the laptop computer on which I do all my writing. The bag also holds some lecture tapes, a couple of books, and a few more toys and memorabilia items. Every new city means getting a mailbox at one of those mailbox rental places. That way, I am assured that where I live will be very hard to ascertain.
To my knowledge, at the federal level the only agencies that would be able to thread together the places I have actually lived would be the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, neither of which is supposed to disclose personal data to private parties or to other agencies.
But there it was: after all these years, a letter from the VA; and they had my residence right down to the apartment number. I had spent the better part of my whole life thinking I'd shaken off all but the legally necessary points of reference the government had about me, only to find out that a bunch of hoehandles I'd honestly forgotten about were there with me all along, quite probably tracking me from one place to the next, keeping their databases current like some old gossip making sure she always had the latest dirt on everyone in town.
If you as a reader do not understand how much that confirms just about every paranoid tendency a person can have, you really don't get it: this is a government that is tracking, recording, listing, cataloguing, and databasing people who want to be left alone and who are doing nothing that would merit the degradation of their right to be left alone.
The VA laptop that got stolen with millions of veterans' records on it? The letter from the VA says that the only fields it had were name, Social Security number, and date of birth. (Disability ratings and a few other vectors were in the database, but they wouldn't apply to me.)
Now, work with me here for a minute. First, why would a laptop being toted around by some civil service lackey have a database like that on it anyway? The database would be practically useless in and of itself. It might be worthwhile as a feeder base for something else, but on its own, the data wasn't rich enough for hardly anything. What was that VA flunky going to do?—practice his Access skills by seeing how many ways he could re-sort the data? And second, given that the VA has now amply demonstrated that it has current information on me, that means the database our Boy Wonder lost would no doubt have had my current address, too, along with those trivial little items like my Social Security number and date of birth.
This is Exhibit Number One of what happens when the government turns into a nosy weirdo: its minions collect all kinds of personal data for whatever compelling reason they've concocted to make their jobs have meaning, and once they've got all that data, they place everyone in the database at risk, both from their own nefarious people and from those who would be able to compromise whatever security they have on the data. They take what isn't theirs—our privacy—and they can't have the decency to ensure even that they're the only ones who can mess up our lives with what they've expropriated.
To the Veterans Administration—and knowing full well that my rage will do no good whatsoever—I say this: Stay the Hell out of my life.
To everyone else, I say this: if you're not afraid of this government, you should be; and if you are afraid of this government, you should be more so.
Not that it will do you any good to be afraid. As far as I can tell, they'll find you when they want to, anyway. It's all part of the price we now pay for the security our government provides as it diligently dismisses any regard whatsoever for the right we thought we had to be left alone.
But at least the government is usually pretty good at pretending to care, I suppose.
The Dark Wraith trods onward.
Before I explain why I'm in a multi-day, grand rage, I should note that I am not upset about the data loss, itself. Pity the hapless crook who actually decides to steal and use my identity: he will find himself with a destroyed and irreparable credit rating, he will make less than $20,000 a year while whining about how unfair life is, and he will ultimately—perhaps imperceptibly until it's too late—become vexed of the physical attributes of the one from whom he stole the identity, said attributes including, but not restricted to, a crooked, bulbous nose, one eyelid that droops in a creepy way that makes people kind of not want to make eye contact for very long, and a vexatious hernia that has to be managed several times a day with a good, hard shove to get the guts to go back in, that push always producing a numbingly sickening "SQUIIIIK-GLURB" noise that makes fraternity boys say, "Dude!"
I shall return to the issue of data theft later in this article. Before that, however, I shall summarize an important feature of my life. This shouldn't take long, so bear with the story for its importance to the matter of the envelope above.
I was an adolescent when my father passed away after a protracted fight against lung cancer. During the course of his barbaric treatment, which included poisons injected into his body and radiation applied to him in doses that literally made his breath smoke when he came out of the Betatron room, Blue Shield sent a letter explaining that his medical benefits were all used up, so my parents were on their own to finish the miserable treatment that would cause him many more months of suffering before his merciful passing one late Sunday afternoon in April. Tens of thousands of dollars in debt, one of the two wage earners dead and the other being a woman, my mother and I were on the streets; and I mean that quite literally. We lived for a time in a big old station wagon, and we both worked several jobs. Over the next few years, we had a series of toilets the occasional landlords called apartments, but those never lasted too long before we didn't have the money for rent. We eventually ended up in an old, abandoned farmhouse that had been in the family for generations. No running water, but a good well and a cistern. The outhouse was appalling to smell, which finally gave me the motivation one hot Summer day to dig a new one. It was all very good, though, especially in retrospect because that was the last time I had a sense that someplace could be a permanent home.
The all night diner out by the big interstate was where we worked the graveyard shift. That was where my mother dropped to the floor one night, succumbing as she finally had to the creeping ravages of untreated diabetes. Doctors cost money, you see; and what exactly is it they're going to give you—eternal life? More likely, they'll give you their latest pharmaceutically wonderful, government-approved chemistry experiment. Oh, yes: they'll also give you a bill. But at least doctors are pretty good at pretending to care, I suppose.
Home was gone, so the road took me many places. After the Army, college beckoned once again. I went from one rooming house to another through the years of grad school. Never too long in one place, never a forwarding address.
I stopped getting mail from the VA by the mid-'80s. Actually, I never heard much from the VA, just from those stupid life insurance companies that told me I could have a low premium on a policy because of my veteran's status.
City to city I went after grad school, looking for teaching work wherever there were colleges. I found the entire concept of tenure ethically disgusting and professionally corrosive, so I certainly never had work for more than a few years in any given place before it was time to move on. That was fine by me: I had learned long before how to keep everything I owned down to a level where I could literally pack and move within maybe 10 minutes. Clothes should all fit in a single duffle bag. Books are for selling at the used books counter at the campus textbooks store; the ones I keep fit in a box along with some toys and old stuff I hold onto for continuity between the now and all the thens of my life. A big old leather bag holds the laptop computer on which I do all my writing. The bag also holds some lecture tapes, a couple of books, and a few more toys and memorabilia items. Every new city means getting a mailbox at one of those mailbox rental places. That way, I am assured that where I live will be very hard to ascertain.
To my knowledge, at the federal level the only agencies that would be able to thread together the places I have actually lived would be the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service, neither of which is supposed to disclose personal data to private parties or to other agencies.
But there it was: after all these years, a letter from the VA; and they had my residence right down to the apartment number. I had spent the better part of my whole life thinking I'd shaken off all but the legally necessary points of reference the government had about me, only to find out that a bunch of hoehandles I'd honestly forgotten about were there with me all along, quite probably tracking me from one place to the next, keeping their databases current like some old gossip making sure she always had the latest dirt on everyone in town.
If you as a reader do not understand how much that confirms just about every paranoid tendency a person can have, you really don't get it: this is a government that is tracking, recording, listing, cataloguing, and databasing people who want to be left alone and who are doing nothing that would merit the degradation of their right to be left alone.
The VA laptop that got stolen with millions of veterans' records on it? The letter from the VA says that the only fields it had were name, Social Security number, and date of birth. (Disability ratings and a few other vectors were in the database, but they wouldn't apply to me.)
Now, work with me here for a minute. First, why would a laptop being toted around by some civil service lackey have a database like that on it anyway? The database would be practically useless in and of itself. It might be worthwhile as a feeder base for something else, but on its own, the data wasn't rich enough for hardly anything. What was that VA flunky going to do?—practice his Access skills by seeing how many ways he could re-sort the data? And second, given that the VA has now amply demonstrated that it has current information on me, that means the database our Boy Wonder lost would no doubt have had my current address, too, along with those trivial little items like my Social Security number and date of birth.
This is Exhibit Number One of what happens when the government turns into a nosy weirdo: its minions collect all kinds of personal data for whatever compelling reason they've concocted to make their jobs have meaning, and once they've got all that data, they place everyone in the database at risk, both from their own nefarious people and from those who would be able to compromise whatever security they have on the data. They take what isn't theirs—our privacy—and they can't have the decency to ensure even that they're the only ones who can mess up our lives with what they've expropriated.
To the Veterans Administration—and knowing full well that my rage will do no good whatsoever—I say this: Stay the Hell out of my life.
To everyone else, I say this: if you're not afraid of this government, you should be; and if you are afraid of this government, you should be more so.
Not that it will do you any good to be afraid. As far as I can tell, they'll find you when they want to, anyway. It's all part of the price we now pay for the security our government provides as it diligently dismisses any regard whatsoever for the right we thought we had to be left alone.
But at least the government is usually pretty good at pretending to care, I suppose.
The Dark Wraith trods onward.
Published
6/16/2006 02:08:00 AM
<< 21 Comments Total
One of your finest posts ever, Dark Wraith.
And I second that DW...
That was incredible.
The only thing I'd take issue with is the government's pretending to care. They're becomeing less and less concerned with keeping the pretense going.
DW,
Hitler took, what, 6 years to destroy the state that "elected" him? Then another 6 to try to destroy the world.
He instituted policies not unlike our present scourge of protective laws.
But he didn't get Germany into a war until after his 5th year. Bush got him beat in that one! The only thing Bush hasn't said, although he's alluded to it, is the coming "thousand Years of peace".
Here's lookng forward to a reincarnated next 6 years of Germanic darkness.
good morning dark wraith: very well said sir. the worst VA letter i ever got was in 1992. they wanted to inform me that they had finally figured out that people in my area of operations were likely exposed to agent orange. i am glad that my union has my medical needs covered. i have been to the VA hospitals and consider myself lucky to be able to avoid that system. usually, i am a free market, free enterprise, libertarian kind of guy. but when it comes to health care i see an arena where the socialist idea might work. once, while on tour, i got very sick with pnuemonia. this was in stavanger, norway. i was taken to olso (at no personal expense) and treated. no questions about being not norwegian, they simply healed me. all over the nordic states i saw efficient health care delivery. but there's an essential mind shift at work there that i don't think we as a society are capable of making. in norway, health care is considered a divine human right. not a commodity to be sold.
Greetings O Dark One,
I'm a first timer, but a fan. Yes, I received said same letter. It seemed to me such a waste of paper, but I suppose they had to cover their ass anyways. I hate this fascist bullshit. And it's no surprise that they found you, it just goes to show that their little corporate Big Brother Project works. Peace.
"Score one for the cat"?
Perhaps.
But, instead of wondering, you know that they know.
That is a beautiful post. And I think it tells a bit more. You had to struggle to get by at an early age and had several horrible events happen that forged your will. For others of us who "had it made", some of us did OK but many did not. I'm struck with the similarity of your story to my father's, who grew up during the depression with one thought in his mind, to get out of the shithole he was in no matter what. I really believe that the stress of our younger years helps to make us what we can be, it's too bed that the professionals aren't allowed free reign to apply their expertise. I think that better people could be made without all the pain, but some measure of service seems called for. I salute you, Dark Wraith.
With respect I say this, Oh Dark One, get that hernia repaired! They don't get better on their own.
Great post. I was just put through the process of logging my SSN in three government databases, and being fingerprinted, and given an FBI background check for a position as a summer clerk at a federal court. It's a two month position.
- Cole
Good afternoon, Cole.
And you know the worst part of that indignity you just endured? That data on you will now exist forever. Databases have something eerily similar to immortality: they get copied, they get archived, they get parsed, they get preserved. The deletion or other loss of one example of a database means nothing. The data lives on, and will do so long past your lifetime.
There's a good side to that, you know. If reincarnation really does happen, it'll make it considerably easier for a future incarnation of you to go back and find details of who you are right now. That should help jog the memory of that future incarnation so the two of you can link up more fully.
Okay, that was reaching for a good side to a bad problem of our time.
The Dark Wraith shouldn't have even tried to go down that weird path.
Good afternoon, BlackDog.
I see no prospect at any time during my tenure on Earth when the hernia will be repaired. For one thing, it's really expensive; for another, I think I have issues with a group of strangers in white garb working with sharp knives that close to parts of me I care about. One errant sneeze during that surgery could bring an end to the bratwurst festival.
Besides, I've learned over the years how to manage the problems a hernia induces. There have been several times when I had to stop a class for a few minutes so I could go to a quiet place and stand on my head.
That's right, BlackDog: If the interior has pushed through too far, it gets trapped on the other side of the fissure, and you feel like you're being strangled. (The weird part is that the worst of the strangulation pain is in the pit of your stomach, not the lower part where the problem is actually occurring.) If the gut that's trapped swells too much, it can't be pushed back through. However—and I learned this by listening as a child to the women in town yakking about their husbands' hernias—if you lie down on your back against a wall, feet against the wall, and "walk" up the wall scooting toward it as your feet go higher, eventually you'll be nearly on your head. Stay that way for about a minute, and all of a sudden, the gut will just slip back in. It's amazing, and the feeling of relief is just to die for. It doesn't happen all at once: you feel "bruised" for a while, but it's nothing compared to what you felt like just a couple of minutes before.
I remember one day I was right in the middle of a financial management class, and I was going through the so-called Capital Asset Pricing Model. I considered my rant so important that I just kept going, even though I was nearly doubled over. I didn't want to sit down (I hate sitting down when I'm roaring about something important in class), but I finally got to the point where I realized that I was simply not going to make it to the end of the lecture. I made it to where I had laid the equation itself out on the board,
rp = rf + βp(rm — rf),
and I told the class I needed a five minute break.
By God, BlackDog, when I went back into that classroom, I gave some of the best wrap-up to a lecture I'd done in years. I was like a new man.
I don't think I'd trade a memory like that for any surgery.
Especially one that could make me something considerably other than a "new man."
The Dark Wraith is not a risk-taker these days.
Good afternoon, Peter of Lone Tree.
There's an important point to your comment.
In the vein of talking about cats, your note reminds me of an incident many years ago. When I was a child, my mother and father worked together running an office. They were the only employees of a mortgage and loan company owned by some rich people in the county.
The office was in this rather cavernous old brick building from the 19th Century. Above "the office" (as we called it) was where the Knights of Pythias held their meetings. The sound of the tromping footsteps at night used to creep me out to no end. Below the office was the basement (or "cellar," as we called it). The cellar was an ungodly, bleak, unlit place of horrors: junk strewn around, a mud floor in some places, and thick cobwebs everywhere. Supposedly, a dentist/doctor had worked down there in the 1800s. The stories about what had happened down there were so bad that I'd run away and hide in the farthest part of the back room of the office when my mother or father would start talking about that basement with one of the old-timers in town who'd amble in to the office ever day to chat.
One of the things about those old days was the mix of formality and informality in that environment. While my father and mother would always dress well to be in the office, there were, of course, kids in there (specifically, me), and the occasional pet. Sometimes, our dachsund, Greta, would be there; she'd bark at the customers coming in (to which my father would growl, "Shut that damn dog up" or "Why can't that mutt bark at Charlie when he comes in here to blab?"). Also, one of the family cats was forever showing up at the office, walking the mile or so it took to get from home to the office.
Now, the cat was a marmelade tom of no small size and no lack of adventurous nature; but I swear to God, every time that cat thought about going near that basement, it would walk gingerly toward the dark hallway that led to the cellar stairs, where it would then stand and stare down into the blackness. The cat would just stand there for a while, then turn and walk away briskly, sometimes twacking its tail as if to discharge an excessive build-up of electrostatic fear.
Well, one day, I was watching the cat do its ritual at the top of the stairs, and much to my surprise, the cat put a tentative paw onto the first step. Since I was sitting out beyond that hallway that led to the stairs, I'm not sure how quickly the cat descended the stairs from that point, but it had definitely disappeared from my sight pretty quickly, and I feared that the animal had finally decided it was time to conquer the great unknown that was at the end of the drop into the abyss.
I didn't say a word to my mother or father: they were usually pretty busy; and besides, I was afraid they'd tell me to go down and get the cat, an act of rescue I wasn't going to do under any circumstances whatsoever.
I don't recall what it was, but I quickly became completely distracted by some other matter and briefly forgot about the cat. It must have been ten or fifteen minutes before I heard what could only be described as the sound of a heard of stampeding, soft-pawed elephants rolling my way.
It was the cat, and it was coming up the stairs with the fervor of a Christian soul bound for its seat at the right hand of Jesus. That cat was easily a foot off the ground as it rounded the corner from the stairs to the hallway. The wall it hit on its turn served only to re-direct its forward momentum and allow it to reshape its body into an Honest John missile coming out of that corridor heading for a rendevous with some place on another continent.
The orange of the animal's fur was black and grey with soot and gobs of cobwebs, and it wasn't going to let the slippery wood floor on the main area of the office deter it one bit from its chosen path, which was toward the front door.
As circumstances would have it, my father's hunting and fishing buddy, Whistle, was just walking in the front door at the very same minute that cat, still very adequately impersonating a missile—clear down to the orange, black, and grey tail puffed like a solid engine's fire plume—was Hell-bound for Anywhere But Here.
I swear, Peter, if Whistle hadn't hiked his leg up at the very last second, that cat would have amputated it on his way out the door.
That was the last I saw of the cat the whole day. When I got home later that evening, the cat was lying on the porch as if nothing had happened.
Well, I'll tell you this, Peter: something did happen. Whatever it was that cat learned in the cellar, the animal never again showed up at the office.
Going from speculation to genuine knowledge was apparently, at least for the cat, a journey that required only one trip.
The Dark Wraith sees a valuable lesson in his story.
And yes, Peter, anyone who thinks that story is worth repeating should feel free to reprint it (with attribute, of course).
The Dark Wraith should write a book of stories about the old days.
Good afternoon, The Realist Dad. I welcome you to The Dark Wraith Forums.
I was thinking about that "waste of paper" point, myself. They had to have sent out some 25 million letters to, as you said, "cover their asses." Twenty-five million two-page letters and the legal-sized envelopes into which they're put, along with the postage to get them from their printing house to our doors.
Plus the cost of tracking down the waywards like me, although—as I noted—they'd been at least able to do that all along.
I am informed by Wild Clover of Clover's Field that it was, indeed, the IRS from which some current addresses were gleaned.
So, because I cannot refuse to supply the Internal Revenue Service with current information concerning my whereabouts under pain of severe penalty, I cannot prevent that information from spreading throughout the government to any agency that has a "need" for it.
And because idiots like the VA Laptop Boy want to share their government resources with the criminal element of America, the data originating from what are supposed to be private files at the IRS spreads into the known universe like smoke arising from a privacy right burned at the altar of Clear and Compelling Sovereign Needs.
Cripe.
The Dark Wraith was just getting himself calmed down, and now he's ranting again.
Oh Dark One, it's great that you can manage your situation so well. I stand down from my request.
Somewhat off post, I just got off the phone with the local chapter of the ACLU. After an hour on the phone, they are going to look into my situation to see if there is a case. In my mind, there most certainly is, but will it hold up in court? At least I finally received a reply, that will make my weekend. I wish for luck, and a little justice. May not get either. But I can still hope, some.
BlackDog, send me a message via the feedback form in the side bar.
Although I can't interfere with what could be a looming legal battle you might be about to engage (and win, I should point out), we can still do a decent little fundraiser to keep you going for a little while in conjunction with the folks at BlondeSense. Liz gave her go-ahead (I think), so we need to talk.
And I won't even have to ask Peter to pose nude with me for the kicker.
The Dark Wraith is prepared for something kind of interesting.
Done Oh Dark One.
Good evening, Karen M.
Thank you for stopping by this morning. I understand that you were going fishing today. You'll have to let everyone know whether or not you had any luck. I think that, these days, if I were to go fishing, I'd probably just forget the rod and reel and simply take the day to sit by a lake and enjoy the view. The best part is right about sunset with my old Coleman stove and the percolator pot brewing some strong coffee to sip while watching the sun go down.
The mosquitoes always detract a little bit from the pleasure, but I still have some of those slow-burning green coils we used to use to ward off the insects. I don't know if they even make those anymore.
A campfire would be nice. A few hot dogs grilled a little too long and some hot coffee and a darkening sky by the lake: boy, that sure would be nice.
The Dark Wraith is drifting a little too far into fantasy.
mmmmmmm,. konagod smells fresh meat. must stalk further....
Back!
Back, I say!
The Dark Wraith defends the food supply.