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 Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee is filing comments on the REAL ID regulations. Comments close today (Tuesday). Instructions for commenting can be found here, and apparently, due to difficulties with the automatic comment system and with receiving faxes, DHS has opened an email address for receiving comments: oscomments@dhs.gov. Emails must have “DHS-2006-0030” in the subject: line.
The Committee took care to offer constructive ideas, but the most important takeaway is summarized by Ryan Singel at Threat Level:
The Department of Homeland Security’s outside privacy advisors explicitly refused to bless proposed federal rules to standardize states’ driver’s licenses Monday, saying the Department’s proposed rules for standardized driver’s licenses — known as Real IDs — do not adequately address concerns about privacy, price, information security, redress, “mission creep”, and national security protections.
“Given that these issues have not received adequate consideration, the Committee feels it is important that the following comments do not constitute an endorsement of REAL ID or the regulations as workable or appropriate,” the committee wrote in the introduction to their comments for the rulemaking record.
I’ll be testifying on REAL ID today in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Here’s Congress siding with Boston’s idiotic public officials. The Terrorist Hoax Improvements Act of 2007 would allow government officials to sue people who fail to promptly clear things up when those officials mistakenly think that they have stumbled over a terrorist plot.
There’s nothing in the bill allowing individuals or corporations to sue government officials when hare-brained overreactions interfere with their lives and business or destroy their property.
The comment period on Department of Homeland Security regulations implementing the REAL ID Act ends early next week. A broad coalition of groups has put together a Web page urging people to submit their comments. The page has instructions for commenting, a quite helpful thing given how arcane the regulatory process is.
Feel free to comment — good, bad, or indifferent – on the regs. My views are known, but the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t know yours.
Oh MY, the title of this post is meta.
I found a rare opportunity to lightly critique Bruce Schneier’s thinking and put it on Cato@Liberty. These opportunities don’t come around often . . .
On Monday, the WashingtonWatch.com wiki went “live” – with a lot of promo efforts dedicated to getting it in front of an ever-broader audience. Along with a release out on PR Newswire, it got a friendly write-up on TechCrunch, where Mike Arrington is rubbing his hands together in anticipation of the fun.
I’m pleased to see that several people and groups have begun editing bills of interest to them. It looks like the National Association of Realtors has a say about the Community Choice in Real Estate Act, though they don’t seem to be winning the day with site visitors, judging by the votes.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest is making the case against cutting the beer tax. Love the comment on that page. A couple of different editors have added information to S. 9, The Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007. It’s one of the consistently popular bills on the site.
Of interest to folks here on TLF might be the write-up of S. 744, The SAVE LIVES Act. That’s Senator McCain’s public safety spectrum bill. I’m not equipped to determine whether the editor of that bill makes any sense. Luckily, anyone with an Internet connection can, and they can improve it too, if they want. It’s a wiki.
Alex Tabarrok on Marginal Revolution posted an interesting comment on J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter wealth. Though it’s been up for 2+ days and generated several comments, I don’t see a mention of copyright anywhere. I think it’s very relevant. This is a blog of smart and aware readers and writers.
Update: Commenter “candid” spots a reference to “IP” in comment #3 at Marginal Revolution, confirming my observation about their writers and readers, and drawing into question my own capabilities . . ./Update
To see discussion of copyright, one must go to Matthew Iglesias’ follow-on. It’s not him, but his commenters who surface the intellectual property issue. Commenter “Rich C” says:
If Rowling (and her publisher) could not rely on an internationally enforceable system of intellectual property rights, her income would be a good deal lower. Rowling’s wealth is a product of protectionist policies, not free trade or technology.
A system of support for creative artists that does not depend on current forms of intellectual property protection (such as that Dean Baker has proposed) would still allow Rowling to live an extraordinarily comfortable life, but would sharply limit the windfall gains to her and her publisher. A system of real free trade in creative products would not increase inequality to anything like the degree we see with our system today.
I don’t know anything about this Dean Baker or his proposal, but I do think copyright is very relevant to J.K. Rowling’s wealth, and I think more people should be thinking and talking about its role in creativity, wealth creation, and sometimes windfalls.
(Via Will Wilkinson.)
Matt Shannon questioned mine – and got an earful in the comments!
(It may be a coincidence / mistaken identity. Don’t assume I got my Google research right.)
In our paper Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining, Jeff Jonas and I pointed out the inutility of data mining for finding terrorists. The paper was featured in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this year, and a data mining disclosure bill discussed in that hearing was recently marked up in that Committee.
On his blog, Jeff has posted some further thinking about 9/11 and searching for terrorists. He attacks a widespread presumption about that task forthrightly:
The whole point of my 9/11 analysis was that the government did not need mounds of data, did not need new technology, and in fact did not need any new laws to unravel this event!
He links to a presentation about finding the 9/11 terrorists and how it could have been done by simply following one lead to another.
Jeff feels strongly that Monday morning quarterbacking is unfair, and I agree with him. Nobody in our national security infrastructure knew the full scope of what would happen on 9/11, and so they aren’t blameworthy. Yet we should not shrink from the point that diligent seeking after the 9/11 terrorists, using traditional methods and the legal authorities existing at the time, would have found them.
Tomorrow, the House Homeland Security Committee is hosting a “Border Security Tech Fair.”
Vendors scheduled to participate include: Sightlogix, Scantech, Wattre, Hirsch, Bioscrypt, Cogent Systems, Cross Match, L1 Identity, Sagem Morpho, Motorola, L3 Communication, Authentec, Privaris, Mobilisa, and Lumidigm.
I don’t know all of these companies, so I made some educated guesses about the links (and I may have gotten the wrong division of Motorola), but it appears that fully 11 of the 15 participants are in the biometrics industry.
If you think for a minute that this is about the boundary line dividing the United States from its neighbors, I have a bridge to sell you. No wait – I have a “biometric solution” to sell you. Mobilisa, for example, is being used to run background checks on the citizens of Clermont County, Ohio.
Participants in the Homeland Security Committee’s lunch briefing are all in the biometrics industry. One of them, James Ziglar, wrote an op-ed in favor of a national ID in Monday’s New York Times. He claims it’s not a national ID, but then, he’s got a biometric solution to sell you.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.