Articles by Jim Harper 
Jim is the Director of Information Policy Studies at The Cato Institute, the Editor of Web-based privacy think-tank Privacilla.org, and the Webmaster of WashingtonWatch.com. Prior to becoming a policy analyst, Jim served as counsel to committees in both the House and Senate.
The state-federal showdown on the REAL ID Act is going through its long slow build. REAL ID would have states issue nationally standard IDs (read “national IDs”) by May 2008. Numerous states have passed bills and resolutions rejecting REAL ID, what with its $17 billion (net present value) costs, administrative hassles, and privacy/security threats for state residents.
The hook the federal law uses is that drivers’ licenses and IDs from non-compliant states won’t be accepted for federal purposes after the May 2008 deadline. From a ComputerWorld story:
“I think residents of states that choose not to comply are going to be displeased with their leadership’s decision when we get closer to full implementation,” a DHS spokesman said. “They’ll no longer be able do certain things that carriers of state-issued drivers licenses take for granted today.”
But the main thing the federal government uses state-issued IDs for is airport checkpoints (even though they’re not technically required). When the REAL-ID day of reckoning comes, federal officials will be standing in the way of American travelers. Accordingly, federal officials will take the heat. Accordingly, the federal government will back down.
In fact, the feds will back down before it even comes to that. The outcome in this game of chicken is easy to predict.
The imagery that you see here on the TechLiberationFront site is a clever little rhetorical flourish, I think. We’re mostly free-market types, but our Maoist-Soviet-Che Guevara-ish imagery skewers the idea that the political left has a lock on revolutionary ideas, dissent, civil liberties, and – oh, I don’t know – gusto.
So I’m delighted to find a Web site in a similar vein from none other than the National Republican Senatorial Committee. They have a site up called StopLiberalCensorship.com, which carries a revolutionary (if partisan) message:
Free speech is under attack.
As Democrats in Congress eagerly line up to legislate what you hear on the radio it begs the question: what’s next? Newspapers? There’s no end in sight to their power grab.
It’s about the Fairness Doctrine, the idea of requiring media to apportion their messages and content based on political judgments and direction. James Gattuso and other TLFers have rightly criticized it in spades. Adam specifically called out Democrats’ abandonment of free speech here.
The site seeks people to sign a petition saying that “Republicans should do everything in their power to defeat the Democrats’ attempts to trample our First Amendment rights.”
It’s a welcome turn of the tables to see Republicans on the barricades – in berets, perhaps? – defending freedom. Viva la revolucion!
S. 1748, the Broadcaster Freedom Act of 2007 is the Senate bill to abolish the Fairness Doctrine.
Update: Here’s the vote on an amendment to prevent the Federal Communications Commission from repromulgating the fairness doctrine. Forty-seven Democrats (and the independent who caucuses with the Democrats) voted against it.
C|Net’s News.com exists to make money. It pays reporters and editors to produce stories that will interest people and get them to read C|Net content, because that readership induces advertisers to pay them.
So it is no act of beneficence or altruism when a reporter goes out and asks 13 security companies whether government spyware used in investigations would be detected by their security software, or whether they would intentionally fail to report it. The results are interesting, and they’ve been reproduced verbatim by C|Net, in a calculated attempt to make money.
I’m having a little fun with the “greed” talk, of course, and don’t see anything wrong with seeking profit, because profit-seekers do a lot of good for others. In this case, a reporter is putting tough questions to software companies on our behalf – and putting those companies on notice that they should think twice before altering or degrading their products at the behest of law enforcement.
That’s a small but important help to our privacy protections. And it’s provided by the market for infotainment – which is as important, if not more important, than lobbying our representatives or trying to sue the government.
Credit is due Google for announcing a privacy-improving change to its cookie policy. According to Peter Fleischer, writing on the official Google blog, Google will be altering its cookie-setting practices to give its cookies an expiration date of two years from the time they’re set. The previous cookie practice was to give all cookies persistence until 2038.
Google’s change doesn’t tame the cookie monster, of course. A cookie re-issued every ≤2 years until 2038 and beyond has the same tracking power as a cookie expiring 31 years hence. But rare users of Google rightly should be “forgotten” by Google in two years.
As important as the substance of the new cookie policy, Google is talking about their information practices and the effects their practices have on privacy. What other company does even that?
It remains with you to tame the cookie monster, if that’s what you care to do. Your web browser provides you the ability to control them, which gives you the responsibility to do so. I control mine.
Ever get frustrated asking your Member of Congress to limit government surveillance and the advance of surveillance technology? Ever even try? Probably not, because you know you wouldn’t get a straightforward answer if you did.
That’s why I was delighted to read about the Seeing Yellow project on Ars Technica. The idea is for people to call and pressure printer manufacturers to let them turn off the tracking function that has been incorporated into many color printers at the behest of the U.S. government. Knowing that consumers care about their privacy, printer manufacturers (and others who learn from their experience) will be inclined not to build surveillance into their products.
It may not happen right away, but active consumerism gives you a vote about government surveillance every time you buy a printer, not just once every two, four, or six years.
Here‘s a sign of where we’re headed with uniform government identification systems and social control.
No, it’s not some futurist’s musings about the coming dystopia. It’s S. 1788, a bill introduced in Congress Friday to revoke people’s passports it they’re more than $2,500 in arrears on their child support payments. Bill text isn’t available yet, but what due process is given before the government revokes a person’s ability to travel internationally? Do we want to discuss whether this is an appropriate penalty for being in debt?
What other good purposes might de-identifying people promote? Simson Garfinkel wrote a good article on this back in 1994. In a Wired article called “Nobody Fucks with the DMV,” he wrote:
The driver’s license has become something it was never intended to be: a badge of good citizenship. Pay your bills to city and state, pay your child support, don’t get caught using drugs, and the state will let you keep on trucking. Screw up, and they’ll clip your wings.
Now for the futurist’s musings: Your margin of error for getting cross-ways with government regulations will get narrower and narrower as government identity systems get stronger and stronger.
Companies that hire PR firms to lead their outreach efforts in Washington are making an implicit confession: They have a PR problem. So it is with Verax ‘Identity Fusion Center.’
I learned about the company when a representative of theirs from Dutko Worldwide called me requesting a meeting with one of their executives. I get these requests from time to time, and I’m open to anyone making the case for their technology or business model.
From the looks of things, Verax has a difficult case to make.
Continue reading →
Federal Computer Week reports on the anemic funding for REAL ID in the Department of Homeland Security appropriations bills that spend money on DHS for fiscal year 2008, which begins October 1st. This is a reflection of the lacking enthusiasm for a national ID in Congress (as in the Administration, which also underfunded REAL ID in its budget).
The House bill has only $50 million in it for REAL ID, and the Senate bill has no money at all. But the Information Technology Association of America is on the case.
That’s not much, but at least it’s a start, said Jennifer Kerber, senior director of homeland security programs at the Information Technology Association of America, whose members are high-tech companies. Many states look at Real ID as an unfunded mandate from the federal government, which could undermine the program, she added.
“If the federal government doesn’t come up with funding, then some states will not implement Real ID,” Kerber said. “We’ve already seen some cases where [state departments of motor vehicles] have asked for money to improve their processes, but the state legislatures have turned them down because they don’t see anything coming from the feds.”
Without doubt, Jennifer and her colleagues are up on Capitol Hill warning of this awful fate. ITAA issued a shabby “white paper” in May arguing for full funding of REAL ID and saying that it would “enhance” privacy. Embarassing.
It’s unfortunate to see an otherwise solid trade association acting as a government supplicant and working to undermine freedom, supposedly on behalf of the information technology industry.
TechCrunch has a write-up of a Belgian court ruling, based on the EU copyright directive, that Internet Service Providers bear responsibility for stopping illegal file-sharing on their networks. Apparently, though, the ruling doesn’t create a general obligation to monitor.
We get a lot of benefit from treating ISPs as common carriers, empty vessels without any obligation other than to serve their customers. I wrote a piece in Regulation magazine a while back arguing against imposing a responsibility on ISPs to control viruses. Though they can do so as a service to customers, requiring it of them sets a precedent that leads to all kinds of regulation and monitoring being imposed through the ISP bottleneck.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.