November 2007

In February, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the following about the REAL ID Act: “If we don’t get it done now, someone is going to be sitting around in three or four years explaining to the next 9/11 Commission why we didn’t do it.”

Alice Lipowicz of Washington Technology reported on REAL ID today:

[Chertoff] and other DHS officials have said that older drivers present a lower terrorism risk and, therefore, might be allowed more time to switch to Real ID licenses. According to the Washington Post, DHS might extend the deadline to 2018 for drivers older than 40 or 50. Moreover, states will have more time to implement the act, Chertoff said.

DHS had previously extended the statutory May 2008 deadline for beginning implementation to December 2009 and recently set 2013 as the deadline for full implementation.

2013 is more than 5 years from now – 2018 is more than eleven. For all Chertoff’s urgency at the beginning of the year, has the Department abandoned its mission to secure the country?

Of course not. But Chertoff and the DHS were clearly trying to buffalo the Congress and the American people on REAL ID earlier this year. They haven’t succeeded.

Happily, this national ID system doesn’t add to our country’s security as its proponents have imagined. We are not unsafe for lacking a national ID. I explored all these issues in my book Identity Crisis.

If REAL ID were a sound security tool, pushing back the deadline for compliance would be a security risk, of course, as would reducing the quality of the cardstock used to make REAL ID-compliant cards – another measure DHS is considering.

Forget security, though. DHS is straining to get the program implemented just so it can claim success and save some face.

“[T]hose who are singing a funeral dirge, I think they’re singing the wrong tune,” Chertoff said November 6th. Alas, as before, Secretary Chertoff is the one more likely to sing a different song.

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Ryan Singel points out even more problems with Joe Klein’s follow-up post on his train wreck of a column:

In his two follow-up blog posts, Klein compounds his errors and valiantly argues he is right that the Dems are coddling terrorists because a bill passed by the House says that if the NSA targets a foreigner or group of foreigners who will likely communicate with someone inside the United States, the spies need to get court approval.

Klein says this gives foreign terrorists the same rights as Americans.
But, this restriction is only true when the nation’s spies are wiretapping fiber optic cables, telecom switches and web mail providers INSIDE the United States.
Klein continues to miss this most crucial distinction in the debate, which is why THREAT LEVEL, paraphrasing Klein’s column, continues to believe that Klein is well beyond stupid. He’s dangerous.

Outside the United States, such wiretapping isn’t even defined as surveillance and it never has been.

If the NSA is listening in on cell phone calls in Iraq, they don’t need a warrant nor do they need court approval of their techniques.

If the Iranian cell phone user they are listening in on calls an American, they don’t have to stop and get a warrant. Instead they follow long-established minimization procedures that disguise the American’s name, unless there’s a good reason not to.

Wiretapping inside America is the whole reason various bills are being debated. After a secret spying court decided last spring that the government’s wiretapping inside America without having particularized warrants was illegal, the Administration began pushing for new powers from Congress. The administration then scared Congress into rush passage of a bill that massively expanded the government’s spying powers outside and inside the United States, without any real expansion of oversight.

But Klein can’t grasp this simple point, which may be why he defends himself by saying that bills are hard to read and details are unimportant

I can write half-baked articles about subjects I don’t understand. Where’s my Time column?

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I had fun just now looking over the Northern Virginia Technology Council’s upcoming dog-and-pony show promoting the REAL ID Act. It’s a big business opportunity for Washington, D.C.-area technology vendors – nevermind that this national ID law is dying because of nationwide disapproval.

Why fun? Because clicking on the link to Gold Sponsor Wiley Rein LLP, I saw the promotional blurb below their Web banner: “‘Demonstrates a high-caliber command of privacy’ issues. – Computerworld” (It rotates through blurbs – you might have to hit reload once or twice to see it for yourself.)

You can’t promote REAL ID and claim a command of privacy issues. So which is it gonna be?

And what other promotional blurbs might go there? Let’s see ’em in the comments. A few to prime the pump, after the jump.

Continue reading →

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The most frustrating thing about the Klein fiasco is that I can think of a number of people who actually know a lot about the FISA issue and could have provided Time‘s readership with useful information about the state of the debate. At a minimum, they should be able to find someone who can at least take the trouble to read the text of the legislation he’s writing about.

The RESTORE Act is about 20 double-space pages long. You can read it in under an hour. I did it when I was writing up the story for Ars. Ars has a lot fewer readers than Time, and I guarantee you that Klein got paid more for his column than I got paid for my article.

There’s been a lot of commentary of late blaming the Internet for undermining the high journalistic standards of the mainstream media. Well, it doesn’t get more mainstream than Time. So why didn’t the magazine’s vaunted editors notice that Klein’s “summary” was riddled with errors? If Klein couldn’t be bothered to read the bill, shouldn’t Time have assigned a fact-checker to do so? And how do we explain the fact that Internet-centric journalists like Greenwald and Singel (not to mention up-and-coming journalists like Julian) can run circles around Klein on the FISA issue?

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