More about that, "Little List"

A lot of people are talking about the list of names I mentioned yesterday. In comments at The eyes are not here (on Making Light) one of the more common lines of, low-grade, apologia made its appearance; that it might have been legally collected.

In practical terms... it's not plausible. It is so implausible, in fact, as to rise to not worth giving any benefit of doubt. Yes, when caught the people who did this have to be presumed legally innocent. That doesn't mean I can't know beyond a reasonable doubt that story of how this little piece of Brownshirt-style intimidation/terrorism, is a pack of lies.

I did a back of the envelope analysis of what an investigation which didn't use an, "inside source," to collate the information would take... short answer, either a lot of money, or a lot, and I mean a lot of time.

How do I get there?

Because this sort of thing is part of what I did in the army; based on things claimed in the cover letter.pdf sent with the list.

They claim to have based it on observations, and reports from "legal Mexican nationals who infiltrate their social networks and help us obtain the necessary information we need to add them to our list."

One of the things being supposed is they may have used private investigators to do some of the leg work, i.e. to confirm suppositions. This isn't stated in the manifesto, it's just a guess.

Ok... let's assume they did some of that PIs are really bad about giving a cost upfront. Based on what few websites I found with pricing on them, we can guesstimate an average cost of $75 per hour, per investigator. Then we add $25 per hour for surveillance, and assume this was plain-jane, (two PIs in a vehicle, with a video camera. They don't care if they get made, so they don't need to engage in the complicated stuff). If we further assume the preliminary footwork has made it unnecessary to tail more than about 25 percent of the people; and they only did such surveillance once they were sure they were on the list; so as to reduce the waste of spending money only to eliminate the person, we can call it 325 people they tailed.

We'll also be generous and say none of that needed more than the 4 hour minimum of billable hours, and that mileage was trivial. That list of assumptions brings in a PI bill of $325,000.

Which, even before we look at the legal risks to the PI of trying to get HIPAA protected information, the cost alone makes it unlikely PIs were used.

Even if PIs were used it's still almost impossible to believe the story behind the list.

Te final list is more than 1,300 names long, with a huge amount of information which isn't the sort people share with other people (really, was the last time you gave someone who didn't have some right to it your SSN?). That means a lot of legwork. A lot of, "observation". A lot of informers "infiltrating" the social networks of the undocumented.

We are supposed to believe this happened, completely under the radar? That enough collaborators were recruited, to make it possible, and not one of them balked? Not one of them told people they'd had someone try to recruit them?

They then engaged in all the time needed to get this list, and went back to their handlers for their debriefings, and got new direction. All on the down-low?

Right.

Then the handlers did the write-ups of the debriefs, and they collated the data, and cross-indexed it, and ruled some people out, and tagged others as targets, and did the associations matrices, and tagged the supporting evidence, until they were sure they had 1,300+ undocumented workers.

At a conservative 20 hours of collaborator time, per name which went on the list (and that's really conservative), and a conservative back-end of four hours for the handlers and analysts we get, 31,200 man hours to do this.

It's really conservative, because it doesn't count for time spent on leads which didn't pan out. It's 31,000 man hours, 775 man weeks, 193 man-months.

It's 16 man-years.

That's conservative. That's not counting the time to recruit, sensitize and task the collaborators. Lets say each collabotor did ten people, and they were needed for 50 percent of the list: 650/10 = 65 collaborators (which is why I don't buy the "we used sympathetic Mexicans... and why Mexicans? What about the Guatemalans, Salvadoreñnos, Hondurans, Panamanians? The odds of getting ten and not having a fink are long... 65: which is a conservative number, not a fucking chance). Call it five hours to train them up (again, really low-ball, this isn't trivial stuff here, this is SSNs, medical records, daily routines, etc.), that's another 325 hours.

Who did that training? Was it one guy, running around the state giving workshops? Or are we to believe there is a group of guys with that knowledge, who just happen to be this big on the problem of undocumented workers in Utah, who managed to find each other? It's possible but it strains credulity a bit.

The other option, one guy (who's really good) managed to train others, and they did the training. So, lets say we have 7 guys who got trained on training the collaborators; call it 40 hours to train them... and they each did the lower down training.

This is why I don't buy the cover story. It's why I think (apart from the tone of, "The Shadow Knows" to the letter), it's a distraction.

As a distraction it does two things. One, it makes the undocumented, and those who might be accused of it, nervous. I think that is the place it succeeds. Because it might be so.

Two, it's meant to make the search less focused. I think this is, at most, a few people who have a similar mindset, and access. They grabbed a bunch of stuff from work, and put together this list, and cooked up a story to make it seem it wasn't that trivial (and venal) a thing. They also knew they were committing a crime, and this was their attempt to cover it up.

But they don't know just how much work it is to generate the sort of list they stole. Cops do, so I don't think the misdirection worked much. I'd also be very surprised to find out the list was circulated to all that many (if any) police agencies before this. Maybe it went to ICE, they are about the only group which could do anything on this scale. If it did, then the cats going to come out of the bag pretty soon, because the odds are (well, I hope) the criminal nature of the deed was evident from the get go.

The scary thing to ponder is that it might be true. That there is a group out there, which favors taking the law into its own hands, with the sort of skills, money, dedication, operational security, etc., to pull this off.

If that's the case, we have a lot bigger problem than some people sneaking over the border to take jobs the rest of us don't want.

We have a winner

As predicted, Utuh concludes state resources were used to compile list of immigrants, though the report still gives credit to a, "group" of anti-immigration activists.

Utah officials said Thursday they had uncovered evidence that someone used a state employment database to help anti-immigration activists compile a list purporting to identify 1,300 illegal immigrants.

I'll wager it was one, or two, people who work for the state.

Tony Yapias, director of the nonprofit immigrant activist group Proyecto Latino de Utah and former director of the Utah Office of Hispanic Affairs, said in an interview... woman claiming to be a state worker called him June 30 to complain that illegal immigrants were wasting state money.

Yapias said the caller, who said she was Latina and was part of a group of state workers who were angered by illegal immigration, cited specific statistics about state expenditures on pre- and post-natal care for illegal immigrants — the sort of information the Workforce Services Department said was in its database.

“Then, two weeks later, we get this list,” he told KSL.

That, I suspect, it pretty much all of it. Someone who wanted to make a stink, and make it seem there was a large groundswell of support for the position they were taking.

Now it's just a question of rooting them out.