Mercer County PA Online LTCF Renewal

[tim0477]

The Mercer County Sheriffs Office is now only accepting LTCF applications / renewals either by mail or online. Anybody have any experience how long this new process takes? I submitted my renewal online. The website says it can take up to 45 days. It used to be possible to go down there with the forms and payment and walk out with a renewed LTCF the same day. Another case of taking something that used to be simple and fucking it up.

Tim

https://mercercountypa.gov/sheriff/d...nseToCarry.htm

[MikeinPhilly]

The Mercer County Sheriffs Office is now only accepting LTCF applications / renewals either by mail or online. Anybody have any experience how long this new process takes? I submitted my renewal online. The website says it can take up to 45 days. It used to be possible to go down there with the forms and payment and walk out with a renewed LTCF the same day. Another case of taking something that used to be simple and fucking it up.

Tim

https://mercercountypa.gov/sheriff/d...nseToCarry.htm

If they are using the same set up as Philly, Quantum something or other, it's pretty smooth and quick process

[tim0477]

Think the online system was called Permitium or something to that effect.

Tim

[MikeinPhilly]

Think the online system was called Permitium or something to that effect.

Tim

Yeah that's it, I got my renewal quicker using the new site then having to do it in person the previous time.

[tim0477]

Well, so much for the "quick" part. I got my notice that I could pick up my renewed LTCF tomorrow, 3 weeks after I applied online. Liked the old system much better where I could go down there with the forms and walk out with a renewal same day.

Tim

[chunk_norris]

Just to add some context to this thread. Permitium is something that has been sweeping across the country, not just PA, with widespread adoption. I believe there's several hundred county sheriff's in the country who have adopted it to date. I don't have the exact count, and it's likely increased since I last looked. I posted a thread about it here https://forum.pafoa.org/showthread.php?t=387183, regarding my experience with it in Luzerne County. The main issue there was that they implemented it without having adequate resources in place to process permits within the timeframe allowed by law. They initially attempted to claim that they only had to tell me whether or not my application was approved within 45 days, but could take as long as they wanted to physically issue my permit based on their own scheduling constraints. This is obviously wrong under the statute, and I challenged them on it. Once I reached out to the sheriff, they agreed that I was right, and promptly scheduled my appointment within a few days.

For anyone who runs up against this same issue, read through the thread I linked above, and you'll see an email template that I sent to the sheriff which you can use.

There are some other concerns I have with Permitium, and to date I haven't really been able to get much interest on looking into it from anyone. I reached out to a few independent journalists, and some others, trying to draw attention to it.

It's difficult to explain, and for the sake of brevity I'll keep this short. Essentially, every connection you make to the Permitium system, whether you are coming from PA, or GA, or any other state anywhere in the country. Your connection is routed through Ely Lilly servers in Illinois. This includes not only your initial connection to the online form, but also the submission of your completed application. All of it is routed through Ely Lilly servers, before going to the actual Permitium servers where the application is processed and made available to the sheriff. Obviously, this is concerning, and I think the public has a right to know the purpose of this connection. I can explain further how this connection can be identified, but without any interest from someone who can make more noise or do something about it, I'm not inclined to go through the details. If you're curious it is not that hard to figure out. Obviously with all the talk of treating gun control as a "public health issue", and the relentless attacks on the 2A, the potential implications of this are very serious. I can't think of a legitimate reason that Ely Lilly is involved in every single CCW application for hundreds of counties across the country, can you?

[MikeinPhilly]

Just to add some context to this thread. Permitium is something that has been sweeping across the country, not just PA, with widespread adoption. I believe there's several hundred county sheriff's in the country who have adopted it to date. I don't have the exact count, and it's likely increased since I last looked. I posted a thread about it here https://forum.pafoa.org/showthread.php?t=387183, regarding my experience with it in Luzerne County. The main issue there was that they implemented it without having adequate resources in place to process permits within the timeframe allowed by law. They initially attempted to claim that they only had to tell me whether or not my application was approved within 45 days, but could take as long as they wanted to physically issue my permit based on their own scheduling constraints. This is obviously wrong under the statute, and I challenged them on it. Once I reached out to the sheriff, they agreed that I was right, and promptly scheduled my appointment within a few days.

For anyone who runs up against this same issue, read through the thread I linked above, and you'll see an email template that I sent to the sheriff which you can use.

There are some other concerns I have with Permitium, and to date I haven't really been able to get much interest on looking into it from anyone. I reached out to a few independent journalists, and some others, trying to draw attention to it.

It's difficult to explain, and for the sake of brevity I'll keep this short. Essentially, every connection you make to the Permitium system, whether you are coming from PA, or GA, or any other state anywhere in the country. Your connection is routed through Ely Lilly servers in Illinois. This includes not only your initial connection to the online form, but also the submission of your completed application. All of it is routed through Ely Lilly servers, before going to the actual Permitium servers where the application is processed and made available to the sheriff. Obviously, this is concerning, and I think the public has a right to know the purpose of this connection. I can explain further how this connection can be identified, but without any interest from someone who can make more noise or do something about it, I'm not inclined to go through the details. If you're curious it is not that hard to figure out. Obviously with all the talk of treating gun control as a "public health issue", and the relentless attacks on the 2A, the potential implications of this are very serious. I can't think of a legitimate reason that Ely Lilly is involved in every single CCW application for hundreds of counties across the country, can you?

Links or proof?

[chunk_norris]

The fastest way to see it is to go to any Permitium application form, for any county that uses it in the entire country. At the bottom of the form in the e-Signature block, it spits out what it thinks is "your IP address", i.e. where the traffic came from according to their server. The first IP is actually your IP, the second is a Cloudflare IP (which is to be expected), and the last one is always an Eli Lilly IP. They've revealed this themselves, probably unwittingly, or the guy who controls the site where the application actually lives has no idea that's not supposed to be there, one hand not knowing what the other is doing probably. Ultimately, that page is just relying on headers to identify the 3 previous hops that your traffic took to get there, and then spitting them out. This is consistent for every single Permitium application page, for every county anywhere in the US that uses it, and it always occurs this way regardless of where you are coming from on the internet. Conversely, performing a tracert against any Permitium.com county URL/IP address does not take any route through Eli Lilly servers, which indicates that there is some very specific traffic routing configuration somewhere that is specifically directing HTTP traffic for these URLs through Eli Lilly first, before getting to Permitium's actual hosted forms. This also means that when you press submit, the same thing will happen.

Again, I'm not pretending to know exactly why this is setup this way. I think it certainly does beg the question though, and whatever the reason is, the public deserves to know why that traffic is traversing those servers and whether or not anything is happening with their data other than their local sheriff's office using it to process their application.

Just tested this again myself and confirmed the IPs still show up just as I described. I've tested this on dozens of county's application forms through Permitium, many months ago. It's still the same as of right now.

[chunk_norris]

Also, I'd like to add that I did a bunch of digging into Permitium, and I don't have everything that I found previously on hand, but I did definitely get some very sketchy "shell company" vibes from them. There's a guy named Patrick G Ferrell who is registered as a lobbyist in Alabama for ScribSoft Holdings, Inc. dba Permitium, and is also a lobbyist for several Pharmaceutical companies. I believe he worked for the Alabama Pharmacy Association.

This all goes down a rabbit hole of speculation, with very little concrete information on anything, other than the appearance of possible sketchiness regarding who this company actually is and where they came from. At the end of the day, Permitium CCW application traffic is routing through Eli Lilly servers, and I think that's a huge red flag.