Post: #1

Quote:IRS tracks your digital footprint

The IRS has quietly upgraded its technology so tax collectors can track virtually everything people do online.

The Internal Revenue Service is collecting a lot more than taxes this year -- it's also acquiring a huge volume of personal information on taxpayers' digital activities, from eBay auctions to Facebook posts and, for the first time ever, credit card and e-payment transaction records, as it expands its search for tax cheats to places it's never gone before.

The IRS, under heavy pressure to help Washington out of its budget quagmire by chasing down an estimated $300 billion in revenue lost to evasions and errors each year, will start using "robo-audits" of tax forms and third-party data the IRS hopes will help close this so-called "tax gap." But the agency reveals little about how it will employ its vast, new network scanning powers.

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Consumers are already familiar with Internet "cookies" that track their movements and send them targeted ads that follow them to different websites. The IRS has brought in private industry experts to employ similar digital tracking -- but with the added advantage of access to Social Security numbers, health records, credit card transactions and many other privileged forms of information that marketers don't see.

"Private industry would be envious if they knew what our models are," boasted Dean Silverman, the agency's high-tech top gun who heads a group recruited from the private sector to update the IRS, in a comment reported in trade publications. The IRS did not respond to a request for an interview.


In trade presentations and public documents, the agency has said it will use a massively parallel computer system that can analyze data from different networks to find irregularities and suspicious activities.

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The agency declined to comment on how it will use its new technology. But agency officials have been outlining plans at industry conferences, working with IBM, EMC and other private-sector specialists. In presentations, officials have said they may use the big data for:

Charting and analyzing social media such as Facebook.
Targeting audits by matching tax filings to social media or electronic payments.
Tracking individual Internet addresses and emailing patterns.
Sorting data in 32,000 categories of metadata and 1 million unique "attributes."
Machine learning across "neural" networks.
Statistical and agent-based modeling.
Relationship analysis based on Social Security numbers and other personal identifiers.

http://money.msn.com/credit-rating/irs-t...-footprint

Think about the power and intrusiveness the IRS will have now that it has the capability to put together everything you do on the internet with all the access it has to databases.

Say you make a Facebook post about the boat you just bought complete with pictures.

Think about everything the IRS can know about you

-how much income you reported and the type of deductions you took
-all of your credit card and Paypal and other electronic transactions
-the size of your mortgage
-how many vehicles you own, their purchase price and amount owed
-your travel records
-your bank records
-your investment records
-number of people in household and estimated monthly expenses for them
-medical bills
-on and on and on

Maybe the IRS algorithm will decide that you shouldn't have been able to afford that boat based on all the data they have on your income, expenses and assets...........

The federal government will become increasing desperate for revenue as the welfare state and the debt and deficit continue to expand and taxpayers are going to be harassed and squeezed to a degree never seen before in this country

Post: #2

Our text mining technology while good, isn't perfect. I'm a little lighter in knowledge of that area versus other data mining stuff but you have a lot of noise with text mining in general. I'm assuming that the IRS would use this as a contribution to their audit model but it would have a medium sized standard error.

I would turn on your privacy settings as a first step since twitter and fb will let people stream data from those sites on default. 2nd, use cash. They cant track where that money goes offline.

Also few clarifications since I see these mix ups with our clients too. Many times the application and ML/Stats technique are used interchangeably.

Neural nets are a machine learning algorithm that makes predictions with data inputs.
Agent based modeling is a mixture of stats and parameter based entities which are probably being fed in, and/or estimated, data for the parameters.
Relationship analysis is an application of a machine learning/statistical technique to cluster similar groups or prediction/estimation of an outcome (doding taxes).

In the government's case, the ability to combine all sorts of data together into one view of a person is the most scary, even if its very basic arithmetic. And i agree this is a legit issue.

Post: #3

You know it's bad when they're scrounging for pennies in the couch cushions like crack heads.

Post: #4

Quote:"Private industry would be envious if they knew what our models are," boasted Dean Silverman, the agency's high-tech top gun

I don't buy it. While I have no doubt they are working on this sort of tracking technology, the IRS is one of the more incompetent American agencies. I believe this report is mostly to scare people into not cheating in their taxes. You see this occasionally in planted stories about audits and how they even got someone earning only $30,000 a year, or some absurdly insignificant amount.

Post: #5

Nobody's that good, but even so it's just more reason to use tor (though can't get it to work in linux), delete facebook, and encrypt everything.

Post: #6

Instead of investing in all this bullshit why not re-write the tax code so the average person can navigate their way through?

I don't think most people try and cheat. They just make mistakes.

I got audited once. My accountant, transposed one line from $2,477 to $4,277. It was my fault. I signed it without examining the numbers closely, but it wasn't willful or meant to deceive.

Post: #7

Roosh makes a great point which I think relates to the surveillance state and privacy in general. Part of making the masses obedient is scaring the crap out of them. They're putting cameras on every corner but how many people are actually monitoring them? Facial recognition software? Didn't catch the Tsarnaevs. And some of those cameras are just decoys, nothing there but a flashing blue light.

The goal is to have a 100% automated surveillance state so only a few rent a cops are actually needed to monitor the whole thing and you know how that's going to turn out: regular, decent, semi-honest citizens will get their asses handed to them on a daily basis while punks, crooks, and terrorists will operate with relative impunity under a corrupt, inefficient system.

Idiocracy, here we come!

Post: #8

Another reason why if it floats, flys or fucks, rent it. Its not like toys appreciate in value. Owning things is a liability, controlling things is true power. Own nothing, control everything. But does anyone on here know if one was to have debit cards in the name of some offshore entity that did not own (and therefore did not have to declare), they could use the cards to get cash without any detection?

Post: #9

I don't know, they might be bluffing but with 1099-k's coming in now from paypal (ie. paypal reports transactions over a certain level to the IRS now) they've likely been able to pull in a number of businesses and people that have been running off the grid since that started.

Post: #10

Post: #11

The US won't use this system and other systems they have to see the post your making on Rooshvforum.com or will they?

They will however use it as a metric measurement to measure how much will the American society allow the government to control.

If you want to know whether a action the goverment does is for the benifit of it's people ask yourself the following question;

Is this going to help them control people over the next 20 years much more efficiently?

There's a reason why NOW in 2013 a bill for immigrants to gain LEGAL residency in they US is being looked at.

The reason is because the government already has the necessary systems available to control this new flow of population.

By the time we find out what the government has been up to, it is already too late.

Post: #12

Its a bad idea to even try to mess around like that. Declare everything.

(06-17-2013 06:34 AM)Exactaking Wrote:  Another reason why if it floats, flys or fucks, rent it. Its not like toys appreciate in value. Owning things is a liability, controlling things is true power. Own nothing, control everything. But does anyone on here know if one was to have debit cards in the name of some offshore entity that did not own (and therefore did not have to declare), they could use the cards to get cash without any detection?

Post: #13

This is very scary. This combined with NSA data gathering. It's getting very bad. Also, as a rule of thumb, I think its safe to assume that whatever we know about as the public, the government is one step ahead, in terms of ability and discretion to surveil you.

For those saying the technology does not exist yet to make good on the IRS's claims, consider that it may not be available or known to the public yet, but whatever is available to the private sector, even at the highest levels, the government is probably one step beyond.

As doulos2game aptly noted, by the time we know about what they're doing, its too damn late, so if you want to take action that will end up being meaningful for you, its probably time to start now.

I've strongly assumed this level of surveillance was taking place but to have it confirmed publicly is just that much more alarming. I for one am going to take steps immediately to protect against this, to the extent possible, and prepare for potential exit from the US if necessary. Yes, other countries may go on the same path (see Britain spying news story which broke yesterday), but I'm willing to bet the US is on the cutting edge.

Post: #14

I am almost certain that I will spend most of my years living very far away from the US.

I have lived in my country of the Dominican Republic before, and even if it has a corrupted governmental system, it is much better than the US.

To all the "Patriots" out there that think that Obama is the reason why this is happening, I got news for you, YOU WRONG.

My family is in politics in the DR and trust me, no one can create this type of surveillance system over night. It takes year and years of planning only. Years of testing and years of developing.

I am pretty sure that the day the internet, which was created by the government, was given to the people for FREE, a lot of us didn't know that it came with a very HIGH price.

Post: #15

(06-18-2013 12:32 AM)Doulos2Game Wrote:  I am almost certain that I will spend most of my years living very far away from the US.

I have lived in my country of the Dominican Republic before, and even if it has a corrupted governmental system, it is much better than the US.

To all the "Patriots" out there that think that Obama is the reason why this is happening, I got news for you, YOU WRONG.

My family is in politics in the DR and trust me, no one can create this type of surveillance system over night. It takes year and years of planning only. Years of testing and years of developing.

I am pretty sure that the day the internet, which was created by the government, was given to the people for FREE, a lot of us didn't know that it came with a very HIGH price.

This. You gotta live in a "third world country" that can't even afford to run a tax collecting agency, or doesn't have the leverage to fuck around with other countries (i.e. FATCA destroying Switzerland's private banking industry).