It's only a matter of time until someone posts a video of him or herself firing an AR pistol built on a Poly80 lower with shoulder brace, bump stock, Fram oil filter suppressor, using black talon ammo, three times into a mirror to summon the shade of Janet Reno.
"You can't win a war with choirboys. " Mad Mike Hoare
Hold my beer [/FloridaMan]Originally Posted by NEPAKevin
Chris
I've done a bunch or research into this sort of thing for a book series I have on hiatus, and I completely agree. The absence of a digital pattern of life is damn suspicious these days.
I'm curious about how intelligence agencies handle this. Much of this stuff is open source, available for purchase for marketing purposes.
It's been long understood that some universities and private companies will help back stop a cover by creating academic and employment records. But if I were the Adversary and I were trying to figure out if the 26 year old junior cultural attache at the US embassy was a real person or not, I'd buy into those databases through a front company in a heart beat.
If the junior attache supposedly went to the University of Springfield from 2012 to 2016, I'd want to see some debit and credit card activity in nearby zip codes buying stuff like Boone's farm, rolling papers and condoms.
When it comes to the Polymer80 issue specifically, I appreciate that many folks bought their receivers with cash at a gun show, or out of the back of some dudes Trans Am in a Piggly Wiggly parking lot. But I bet a bunch of those people still bought their lower parts kits, slides and barrels off the internet, with a credit/debit card, and had them shipped to their house. Likewise, one of the thousand reasons I never bought into Polymer 80 was while they take Glock parts, they apparently don't fit into Glock holsters. So SKUs that match to a Polymer 80 holster are likely to lead you to Polymer80 owners.
I've come to the conclusion that I don't want to own anything that is "legal" because of an ATF administrative decision letter. What the ATF gives, the ATF can take away in a heart beat. If I have a Glock 19 or a rifle with a 16" barrel that is 26" OAL, transferred to me on a 4473, they can't arbitrarily and capriciously decide to take it away from me.
But your Poly80 heater or 10" AR15 with a "brace?" They can change their minds and be at your door tomorrow. Then you have three choices:
1) You can activate your super secret ninja resistance fighter plan, which will result in you 1) dead in a hail of gunfire or 2) in prison being ass raped.
2) Fight it via the legal system. It's a legal system, not a justice system. You can keep spending money in $200 an hour increments into a bottomless black hole, get a pink slip because you're "That guy at work who is fighting the government over machine guns" and generally wear your ass out.
3) Give the ATF the stuff you spent a bunch of money on and bitch about it on the internet.
There are certain things I'm willing to risk #1 and #2 for, but this stuff isn't one of them.
What amazes me is that the Venn diagram of people who will bitch about how the ATF is an awful, corrupt agency that needs reigned in, and the number of people who bought a brace, POLY 80, or bumpstock because "Look here at this ATF letter that sez it's legal."
Before people start waving the Constitution at me, I'm not talking about what is "right" or what guns God wants you to have or whatever. I'm talking about the fact that big boy games have big boy consequences. I think a bunch of people played this game with a very juvenile understanding of the rules and potential repurcussions.
I was into 10mm Auto before it sold out and went mainstream, but these days I'm here for the revolver and epidemiology information.
> I'm curious about how intelligence agencies handle this.
There is a lady named Jonna Mendez who had a career at the CIA. She has a bunch of interviews up on youtube, flogging her bio. They are just fascinating. One thing from one or another of her interviews was talking about trying to do covert stuff these days was that one of the hardest things to fake was a smartphone: you can't just hand your agent a clean phone; it needs a long backstory of email, texts, browser history, photos, etc. She said that was really hard to fake correctly.
On the subject of modern surveillance making intelligence agencies lives hard, look up how Italy traced the CIA folks in the Abu Omar snatch, or the Mossad assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai.
> But I bet a bunch of those people still bought their lower parts kits, slides and barrels off the internet,...
Absolutely. I just looked, and the first thing I bought from Amazon was a book in 2002. Amazon (and I suspect most online companies) never forget.
> Give the ATF the stuff you spent a bunch of money on and bitch about it on the internet.
If AR's are banned, yep, I'm losing a bunch of money. But if DIY guns are banned, I'm losing the $9.99 I paid for the forging or 80% ... I will destroy/surrender/whatever the lowers and install the parts into a $75+$20 shipping+$30 transfer fee 4473'd lower.
My state did a ban recently, aimed at 3D printed guns, but kind of ambiguous. It was clear the 3D printed receivers I had done were verboten, and maybe the couple of polymer 80% lowers I had were also now banned. A couple of days before the law took effect I destroyed them all. I wasn't happy about the law, but I also wasn't out a lot of $$. If I want to play with 3D printed guns again, I'll put the printer in the car and take it to our out of state vacation place, and leave any resulting receivers there. Which, unlike the in-town house doesn't have a monitored alarm and police response times measured in minutes, but it's the law.
Agree with the point at large in that Polymer80 receivers aren't really "off paper" in any meaningful sense but I think the above is a difficult correlation to make.
From my (limited) time working in fintech interacting directly with the Visa and MC APIs, the only information Visa/MC and your bank have are the time, amount and merchant. The individual details of a given purchase are only known to the merchant. Outside the big box stores (Target being the most notorious) who are putting effort into customer profiling most smaller merchants' PoS systems can't (easily) associate a purchase's details with a person. (At least without some sort of "rewards/loyalty" card where you voluntarily put all your PII in. Or you know, an account that you're logged into.)
The magstripe data on your credit card, for instance, only has a PAN (card number) and name as far as PII goes. The chip and contactless only provide the PAN and a hashed value that can't be decoded to provide name/address/phone/etc. So Visa/MC/your bank know who and when but not what. The merchant (generally) knows what but not who (exceptions noted above).
In general I don't think most banks store transaction history for years on end but I don't really know what the regulatory requirements are. Not that it matters because most all of them sell your information anyway, and generally to companies who probably do retain that information indefinitely. Google "consumer privacy notice" and your bank's name to see how much information they're openly acknowledging they share with 3rd party (nonaffiliates) for "marketing". Even without the details of a purchase the "who" and "when" are valuable data on their own, and that gets packaged, modeled, profiled and sold to all comers.
But I don't think the fine grained details are there. Yet.
In the last few years, those fine grained details have become big money. My example of the kid who went to Springfield U in 2012 to 2016 may have been hyperbole as far as knowing whether the kid bought trojans or Trojans Magnum, but I think as of 2020, it's not. And just debit/credit activity in a certain area is a pattern of life, regardless of whether or not you are able to ascertain someone's favorite flavor of Boones farm.
Also, it's common practice for any online vendor to email you a copy of your invoice that lists exactly what you bought.
I did a deep dive into information awareness, expecting to find lots of unfounded paranoia, but instead most of us aren't paranoid enough. As I mentioned before, the only way to unplug from any of it is to live what would be an unsustainable life for many us.
I was into 10mm Auto before it sold out and went mainstream, but these days I'm here for the revolver and epidemiology information.
I work for a bank you've probably heard of, and the business unit that I work for currently stores card transaction data for 7 years, and it'll be upped to 15 years worth of transactions in a few years. I believe it's regulatory requirements, but I'm on the IT side of things so I don't care as much about the "why" so much as the "how."
I thought Level 3 data provided some level of granularity on what was being purchased. Not an expert in this area so no idea if my understanding of the data being shared may be wrong, but I would imagine the credit card companies could easily tie you to the purchase if it's provided.
This just in...
Go check out CNN's webpage. They were able to track down and identify the members of a Russian wetwork unit that poisoned Navalny's nickers, supposedly by using info from cell phone records and flight manifests.
As an added bonus, they managed to spoof one of the guys into talking about it on an unsecure line...
I bet that clumsy bastard is gonna fall off a balcony.
I was into 10mm Auto before it sold out and went mainstream, but these days I'm here for the revolver and epidemiology information.
Oh and...
Jonna Mendez and her husband Tony are both awesome.
I was into 10mm Auto before it sold out and went mainstream, but these days I'm here for the revolver and epidemiology information.
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