Articles by Jim Harper

Waaaaaay back in October 2004, I blogged about the Markle Task Force and the aid it has given to the architects of the surveillance state.

I have complained directly to the members of the Task Force that I know, but I have a persistent sense that most members are unaware, in denial, or indifferent to the role of the group in promoting such things as the U.S. national ID card.

In my opinion, the Markle Task Force dropped the ball completely on privacy and civil liberties. It angers me to hear them pay lip service to these values. They should choke on the words.

This morning, Markle issued its final report. I’ve only skimmed it so far. It’s a lot of gobbledegook, but I know some of it is meant to minimize information sharing among agencies, which is good. The report urges the national security bureaucracy to rationalize information sharing. Well and good.

I’m glad this is their final report. (No link because I don’t want to enhance its search-engine stature – you can find it.) But now it is not just likely – it is guaranteed – that they will abandon their product to the wolves. As before, Markle work will be used to justify what the surveillance-industrial complex wants to do, disregarding countervailing national interests like privacy and civil liberties. On those, we’ll get none of the good stuff and all of the bad.

This morning, I went over to the event at Brookings where members of the Markle Task Force introduced today’s report. I handed out a one-pager that documents the responsibility of the Task Force for our national ID.

I gave one to Jim Barksdale of Netscape fame, a co-chair of the Task Force. He seemed pleased to get something interesting to read. I hope he’s unpleased to read what I think of his little tea-dance with government power.

I hate it when people who are successful in business or singing or acting think they can do public policy. They come to Yosemite and they feed the bears and they think it’s real cute. Then, when the bears are ripping the tops off of cars, they wonder why. I hear Jim Barksdale is a good guy. He should be embarassed.

Annnnyway, my Markle handout (after the jump).

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It’s not schizophrenia. It’s principle. RFID is cool for tracking stuff, and it’s uncool for tracking people.

Do consumers have power to control RFID? Yes. Will RFID be everywhere? No. Yet more evidence comes from a couple of articles in a recent Information Week.

In one story, InfoWeek reports “Most retailers can’t find a business case for item-level tagging.” Meaning, they’re not going to do it – not in the near term anyway.

What about the pharmaceutical sector, where RFID is being pushed by government regulators?: “Just two years ago, adoption of radio-frequency identification technology by the pharmaceutical industry looked like it was on a fast track. . . . [P]harma’s use of RFID today remains limited to a handful of test projects.”

The upshot? RFID will be adopted where it’s useful, and not adopted where it’s not. Economics, not technology, will determine how it’s used. And economic forces will channel RFID to uses consistent with consumers’ interests.

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Vacation? What vacation? There’s WiFi in my Frankfurt rental apartment! I’m here attending the opening round of the World Cup, Adam’s most-loved sport, and tickets to the games have RFID chips embedded in them.

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security’s Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee met in San Francisco. The most interesting thing about the meeting to me was leaving without showing ID at the airport. But one of the items of highest interest at the meeting was a draft report put forward by a subcommittee of the DPIAC suggesting that RFID should be disfavored for human tracking.

It was subject to some exaggerated reporting, and some RFID industry folks went into a bit of a tizzy. Penny-wise-and-pound-foolishly, they seem to believe that they should preserve the multi-million-chip market for RFID in identification cards, even though doing so frustrates and delays the development of a market for RFID on the packaging of consumer goods, which easily could reach tens or hundreds of billions of tags.

In a near analogy to tagging identification documents, the World Cup has issued a couple million tickets with RFID chips embedded in them. Getting RFID readers into German stadiums makes it likely that club teams will use RFID chips in their tickets henceforth. Kudos to the wily Phillips Corporation for using its World Cup sponsorship to create an installed base of RFID-using venues.

So let’s look at how mighty RFID adds value to the soccer ticket – and what part of any value goes to fans, organizers, or RFID manufacturers and integrators (after the jump).

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The data retention issue is joined. “Data retention” is the idea of requiring companies to hold on to data about their customers in case the authorities later find it would be useful to them.

I don’t think enough can be said about what a perversion of law enforcement in the United States this would be. Because the Fourth Amendment inconveniently requires the government to have reasonable grounds to investigate people, Congress and the Department of Justice are considering outsourcing the task by requiring the corporate sector to conduct mass surveillance.

In a series of articles, Declan McCullagh of C|Net News lays out the latest. A project of law enforcement that has already taken root in the supposed privacy haven of Europe, data retention is a major increment toward a Big Brother state.

There will be plenty to say if this goes forward, but a few things are worth highlighting:

• There is no sound distinction between collecting “traffic data” and collecting “content.” Indeed, traffic data – records of phone calls, connections to the Internet, and so on – can be very revealing information. Once ISPs are required to collect and keep one, they are bound to end up required to collect and keep the rest.
• There is no intellectual distinction between retaining data for a short time and retaining data for a long time (and the cost of doing so will drop). The government’s original demand – a brief window into Americans’ data, “for further review” – will expand along the time dimension, ineluctably, and we will not be able to bargain with Internet service providers for privacy protections that deep-six past embarassments and pecadilloes.
• Information is not just “there” for the taking. Some in law enforcement may believe that information, once produced, should be available to them. Not true. Information has qualities equivalent to property. We constantly hoard it, share it, hide it, and broadcast it in the course of directing our lives. A government mandate that prevents this takes power from all of us. And does so in direct contravention of founding principles.

The data retention issue reminds me of an instance several years ago when a FINCen official said to me that they only wanted information-parity with the private sector – unaware, apparently, that the law for good reason places a specific disability on the government in this area.

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