The Department of Homeland Security issued regulations to implement the REAL ID Act today. Well, it issued regulations to delay implementation, anyway. The regs really don’t explain anything in this fundamentally flawed national ID law. They just kick the can down the road.
I’ll compile here some links to Cato@Liberty blog posts about what I’ve been up to. Apologies to C@L readers forced to slog through my meanderings twice.
First of all, it’s interesting to watch the slow-motion collapse of so many government ID programs because they are so poorly designed and poorly thought through.
That isn’t stopping politicians from trying to shore them up. Representative Barbara Cubin (R-WY), for example, has been misdirecting her state’s legislators about what the law says.
I originally thought that Senator Collins (R-ME) was confused about REAL ID. Her state was the first to pass legislation rejecting REAL ID, so you would think she would not try to help force states to implement a national ID. But it now is quite clear that Senator Collins (R-DHS) supports REAL ID.
The people who know what they’re talking about are folks like George Smith up in Maine and – my very favorite – Bill Bishop, the Director of the Idaho Bureau of Homeland Security. Summarizing REAL ID’s utility as a national security tool, Bishop said: “I don’t believe in the Easter Bunny, I don’t believe in Santa Claus, and I don’t believe in the Lone Ranger. Which means I don’t believe in silver bullets.”
Look for the forthcoming podcast on REAL ID (and other cool stuff), right here on TLF.
Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune has long been one of my favorite newspaper columnists. He’s penned another excellent piece for today’s Trib pointing out how illogical it is that the government continues to regulate broadcast speech as if nothing has changed over the past 30 years.
He points out that the FCC’s recent fines for “indecent” content on broadcasting are increasingly silly in a world where kids can get the same programming online simultaneously. He also points out the absurdity of this week’s record $24 million fine against Univision for violating the hopelessly out-of-date Children’s Television Act. He argues:
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Wharton professor Kevin Werbach has posted an interesting new paper on net neutrality that’s not really about net neutrality. His thesis is that while he agrees with the proponents of regulation that broadband network operators will disadvantage content and application providers and thus stifle innovation, he doesn’t think anti-discrimination rules are the way to go. In fact, he does a great job of explaining why they’re not a good idea and how discrimination of all kinds–from content delivery networks (CDNs) like Akamai, to propriety video services like ESPN 360–serve the interests of both consumers and network operators. He also highlights how difficult it would be under neutrality rules to distinguish anti-competitive discrimination from benign discrimination like spam blocking or legitimate traffic management.
Instead he argues that the real issue missed by the neutrality debate is interconnection. “The defining characteristic of the Internet is not the absence of discrimination, but a relentless commitment to interconnection,” he writes. Networks withholding interconnection is the real threat to innovation. In particular, he is concerned about access tiering, “[broadband networks] charging content and application providers additional fees for preferential access to their broadband access customers.”
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EFF linked to this summary of Microsoft v. AT&T which, unfortunately, completely misunderstands the thrust of the case:
AT&T’s position is that its speech recognition software is protected by US patent, on the grounds that it constitutes a “component of a patented invention.” Microsoft was apparently granted license to utilize that software in the US, but AT&T contends that the duplication of that software outside of US boundaries, with the intent to sell the duplicates overseas, is a violation of that license. That view was upheld by the Federal Court of Appeals, and Microsoft is appealing that decision…
Olson built a case against AT&T’s position: For foreign replication to work, a golden disk is shipped abroad to the replication service, containing the master of the Vista operating system that includes AT&T’s drivers. It’s not software at that point, Olson says, because no one can execute it. When it’s installed onto a hard drive, then it becomes software, and it’s the end customer who does that.
If you accept that argument, Olson’s case goes on, then Microsoft did not copy AT&T’s software. And since the physical components – the hard drive, processor, and optical drive – necessary for the copying process to happen may or may not have been supplied by manufacturers in the US, then US courts may not have jurisdiction anyway.
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