Think About It

Internet Sales Tax Coming to Your Neighborhood

If you are one of those people who enjoy shopping online and not paying state sales taxes, your enjoyment may be short lived.  The mega-online retailer Amazon.com has sued the state of New York over a NY law that requires out-of-state companies to collect NY sales taxes.  Amazon is charging the NY law is unconstitutional.

NY state officials estimate NY state would gain about $50 million by requiring Internet giants such as Amazon.com to collect state sales tax.
Businesses that are physically in New York already collect NY state sales taxes on online purchases.

With so much money at stake, this case will undoubtedly wind up on the steps of the Supreme Court. 

Some of the questions are:

Should state governments be allowed to collect sales taxes from out-of-state companies on their online sales?

Should the federal government impose a national sales tax on Internet sales?

If the state and/or federal government doesn’t collect sales taxes for online sales, doesn’t this give online retailers an unfair advantage over traditional retailers?

The Unseen War with China

  The U.S. is at war, but not in the conventional sense.  Computer hacking, once the domain of geeky teenagers, has now moved into the shadowy world of foreign intelligence agencies.  Our government is reluctantly admitting that secret files within the Pentagon have been breached by unknown an unknown person or persons in China.  Recently, an innocent looking military shopping list from India was found to contain a deeply embedded computer code known as “Poison Ivy,” which allows the foreign agent to view each and every keystroke that is subsequently made on the recipient’s computer.  Poison Ivy also renders firewalls useless, and malware software isn’t detecting the embedded codes.  Last year, over 12,000 of these mysterious e-mails turned up in government agencies and defense contractors, and most of these intrusions can be traced back to the Internet address cybersyndrome.org, which is based in China.  Cybersyndrome is one of China’s largest Internet providers.  Other hacking has been traced back to Russia.  “It’s espionage on a massive scale,” said Paul Kurtz, a former high-ranking national security official.

   Often these foreign intruders route their electronic spying through one or more other countries, such as Saudi Arabia.  The detection is difficult because the foreign agents constantly change the coding, which means as soon as one is discovered and erradicated, another pops up.  This problem is not confined to the U.S.; Britain’s MI5 notified nearly 300 companies in 2007 that hackers from China were attempting to gain information. 

   The questions are:  How much sensitive information have they gotten?  How many of our intelligence agents are known to China and Russia?  How many trade secrets have they stolen?  How many Trojan Horses have they planted deep into our computer systems?  Will all of this render our missile defenses useless?    Think About It.

Internet Spies

“Rook” has a few thoughts about Internet spying.

“It’s not paranoia: they really are spying on us.

Most commercial enterprises online use “cookies,” little bits of tracking software slipped onto your computer, and other methods, to record the Web sites you visit, the ads you click on, even the words you enter in search engines; information that is often held onto forever. They don’t tell you they’re doing it, and they don’t ask your permission.

Now Internet service providers are getting into the act. Because they control your connection, they can keep track of everything you do online. So I.S.P.’s have started to sell the information they collect.

The motivation behind this spying is money. The big growth area in online advertising right now is “behavioral targeting.” Web sites can charge a premium if they are able to tell the retailer of luxury sports cars that its ads will appear on Web pages clicked on by upper-income, middle-aged men.

The information, however, gets a lot more specific than age and gender, and more sensitive. Companies can keep track of when a particular Internet user looks up singles dating services, visits adult Web sites, buys diabetes drugs online or participates in any particular discussion groups.

Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of privacy, especially when the information used is personal. The bigger issue is the digital dossiers that companies can compile. Some companies have promised to keep data confidential, or to obscure it so it cannot be traced back to individuals. But it’s hard to know what a particular company’s privacy policy is, and there are too many to keep track of. And privacy policies can be changed at any time. There are no assurances your personal information won’t be abused.

There is also no guarantee that the information will stay with the company that collected it. It can be sold to employers or insurance companies, which have financial motives for wanting to know if their workers and policyholders are gay, alcoholics or have certain diseases.

It could also be obtained by the government, which needs only to serve a subpoena to get it - and these days that formality is often ignored. In Totalitarian countries it is no longer necessary for the government to have family and friends spy on each other. Web monitoring provides them with all the information they need to maintain a steel gloved fist on the population.

The public has been slow to express outrage, primarily because they are ignorant of the scope and consequences of Web monitoring and recording.”