Matt Mower's JetBlue sky post reminded me that I've been meaning to post another round of kudos to Jet Blue.  I had a round-trip flight from Dulles to Long Beach scheduled for this holiday weekend and I cancelled the trip.  I called, anticipating ridiculously high cancel/change fees, only to be pleasantly surprised when the change fee was only $25.  $25.  And this was less than 12 hours before the flight was scheduled to depart.  They really are fantastic.

Snow, snow, and more snow...that's the story here in DC. We're buried. 

Observation: snow sliding off of a rooftop makes a LOT of noise. Enough to wake a sleeping person up thinking that a helicopter is flying right outside her window.

It's beautiful, though...some kids built a snow fort out front. And, by fort, I don't mean some wimpy mound of snow. This is literally a fort--four walls and a roof with stragetically-placed windows. It looks like an all-white brick building. I am impressed and I expect these kids will be builders or architects when they are of age. I made a snow angel--they built a structure.

Now, I grew up with snow..errr, near snow, anyway--I grew in about thirty miles east of Sacramento, California, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. At least once a winter we would "go to the snow" for a day and drive about an hour up into the mountains to spend the day sledding, tubing, and generally wearing ourselves out while drinking hot chocolate and eating Oreos. And we did have a snow day or three over the course of my entire elementary and high school years--not because of snow in my town, but because my school district covered about 2000 feet or so in elevation and the school buses were stored at the high end of that elevation--if there was snow in Placerville or thereabouts, even an inch, those of us in El Dorado Hills couldn't get to school. But that would only be for a day, and it was rare.

But on the east coast, snow is different. I guess it isn't treacherous the way mountain snow driving is--anyone who has driven from Sacramento to South Lake Tahoe on Highway 50 in the winter has seen the over-freeway signs warning of "changeable weather ahead; carry chains." Everyone had chains for their cars; you simply did not attempt to drive in snow without them (or without snow tires). You would not be allowed anywhere near the pass without them. But here, there are all of these people out driving their little Ford Fiestas in two feet of snow and seeming perplexed when they drift majestically into a snow drift and are stuck. This amuses me.

This policy (link via eBay Customers' Privacy Not Protected at The Shifted Librarian) is just scary.  TSL is referencing a post on LawMeme today detailing comments by Joseph E. Sullivan, Director of Compliance and Law Enforcement Relations, Senior Counsel, Trust and Safety for eBay.  Sullivan apparently made the comments to law enforcement officials at the CyberCrime2003 conference last week in Connecticut (he's on the speaker list for a session called "eBay: Working with Law Enforcement").  In short, Sullivan confirmed that

Without a subpoena [emphasis added by JK], eBay will provide the following information regarding an eBay user to law enforcement:

Full Name, User ID, Email Address, Street Address, State, City, Zip Code, Phone Number, Country, Company, Password, Secondary Phone, Gender, Personal or Business, Shipping information (Name, Street Address, City, State, Zip)

In addition eBay will provide the following transaction information:

Bidding History on an Item, Other Items for Sale, Feedback about a user, Bidding history of a user, Prices paid for items, Feedback rating, and Chat Room/Bulletin Board (!)....

Jenny comments that eBay is "acting like the anti-librarian (let's proactively give away information about our customers!)" and continues "If you use eBay, you should let them know how you feel about this, too."

The gist of the presentation (per LawMeme's report, anyway) was that eBay does not require a subpoena for access to this kind of information.  Now, I'm not an attorney, but this seems to imply that eBay is empathizing with the poor law enforcement officials who are forced to jump through all of those hoops and deal with all of that red tape in order to access personal information about the target of an investigation.  Yes, those poor police investigators.  This goes to my "I'm not an attorney" statement, but--is it really that difficult to get a subpoena?  Doesn't a subpoena simply mean that a judge somewhere has agreed with the prosecutor that there might be evidence of a crime in the requested data??  These are not rhetorical questions--I'm actually asking. 

I certainly understand that eBay has a business interest in preventing fraud on its site, and I might even consider it reasonable for eBay to proactively call in law enforcement if an internal audit of some sort revealed potential fraud.  But to simply hand over that information when it is requested, without the backing of a judge--it's just scary, and it's enough to make me think twice before I'd consider using their services (I, like TSL, have never used eBay).

This makes me wonder what Amazon's policy is, though, as the other big eRetailer out there with eBay, and how either of their policies vary based on the jurisdiction of the law enforcement personnel making the request.