I have a blog post up at Cato@Liberty today about Senate Democrats’ national ID plans. The thing is nine printed pages long. It doesn’t get my recommendation that you read the whole thing—unless you really jones for identity-systems talk. Here’s a summary:
The plan is confusing, disorganized, repetitive, and sometimes contradictory. Summarizing it is a little like trying to piece together the egg when all you have is the omelet, but three themes emerge: First, this summary backs away from an earlier claim that there would not be a biometric national identity database. There will be a national biometric database. Second, repeating the word “fraud-proof” does not make this national ID system fraud proof. Third, this national ID system definitely paves the way for uses beyond work authorization. This is the comprehensive national identity system that people across the ideological and political spectrum oppose.
I pity the Hill staffer who had to write the national ID parts of the plan. He or she almost certainly doesn’t know enough to write sensibly about the design of identity systems, and the demands of politics require the plan to talk about impossible things as if they’re possible, and even easy.
According to the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press' First Amendment Handbook, twelve states forbid the recording of private conversations without the consent of all parties. Maryland is one of them.
And now a guy who was recording his own antics on a motorcycle is facing a felony charge because he continued recording during a traffic stop. David Rittgers has more on the Cato@Liberty blog.
Laws that ban all surreptitious recording to get at wrongful recording are overbroad and damaging. Laws that prevent the recording of police officers are particularly wrongheaded. Maryland needs some technology liberation.
—all one paragraph of it—on the Cato@Liberty blog.
The upshot: Their promise not to have a national ID database is almost certainly wrong. Sold as a simple quick-fix, it would take decades and hundreds of billions of dollars to build, encountering untold complexities beyond what we already know.
Over on the Cato@Liberty blog, I’ve written a piece grading the “high-value data sets” agencies released a few weeks ago on Data.gov. (Agencies are supposed to have “/open” sites up by tomorrow.)
The results? Four As, four Bs, seven Cs, eighteen Ds, and eight Fs. Take a look!
Last week, Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig visited the Cato Institute for a lunchtime talk he had sought through Julian Sanchez. Fellow TLFer Julian discussed the substance of the visit on the Cato@Liberty blog.
I discussed the real purpose of the visit as I interpreted it, and Professor Richard Epstein had a comment, too. He finds that Lessig is now, in fairness, a libertarian—if by “fairness” we mean “tit-for-tat.”
Over on the Cato@Liberty blog, I’ve done a fairly lengthy write-up of the Google Flu Trends privacy issue. It’s an important problem that I think deserves a little more than dismissal.
My conclusion: “The heart of the problem lies not with the current leader in search, or any other Internet innovator. The problem lies with our unconstrained government.”
If you’re inclined to dismiss this conclusion as libertarian boilerplate, please read the post.
I’ve run across the most curious thing today.
Searches on Google that should turn up the Cato@Liberty blog (at http://www.cato-at-liberty.org) do not return any result with that URL in it.
Berin took great care the other day to report on the temporary demotion of some Progress & Freedom Foundation content by the Google search engine. I want to do a similar, careful job with this because it’s a sensitive area.
Could I ask you, our visitors, to check what you get from Google? Visit Cato@Liberty and then craft the Google search that you think is most likely to return that Web site. (I’ve tried searching “site:cato-at-liberty.org the” for example, which would return instances of the word “the” on the cato-at-liberty.org domain, and gotten no results.)
Next, if you have any technical knowledge, please opine on what might be causing this to occur. Cato@Liberty is a fairly high-traffic site with a large following. Its disappearance from Google search results is unusual. Any ideas on how to get it restored would be welcome.
Update: It’s a problem with robots.txt on the site.
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