Adam Laurie and Jeroen van Beek, at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, showed the Business Technology Blog how to capture and change information stored on chips included in new passports from many countries. . . . Laurie showed us his son’s British passport, in which he embedded a chip that displays Osama Bin Laden’s photograph. The passports have a key needed to access the electronic information, but it is taken from information found in the passport like the date of birth. Laurie was able in about four hours to decipher the key and use an RFID scanner to steal the digital information from a passport contained in a sealed envelope.
The State Department implemented the e-passport with no sense of the ends it was trying to achieve. Naturally, the means it chose weren’t well suited.
Though I don’t think you’re going to cost-effectively stop or slow terrorism at the borders, Customs and Border Patrol may be less able to interdict bad people at the borders because of the e-passport misadventure.
Before leaving for its August recess last week, Congress saw the introduction of its 10,000th bill. Meanwhile, not a single one of the twelve annual bills that direct the government’s spending priorities in 2009 has passed the Senate and only one has passed the House. Congress is neglecting its basic responsibility to manage the federal government, and is instead churning out new legislation about everything under the sun.
What does Congress occupy itself with? A commemorative postage stamp on the subject of inflammatory bowel disease. Improbable claims of health care for all Americans. And, of course, bringing home pork. Read about it on the WashingtonWatch.com blog.
Although the partisan tensions have now subsided a bit, the greater problem persists. Culberson’s use of video-sharing and microblogging technology continues to violate House rules. So do Speaker Pelosi’s YouTube channel, Digg profile, Flickr page, and Facebook profile. The new rules proposed by Capuano and supported by Pelosi would not authorize these uses. In contrast, alternative rules (PDF) proposed by the Republican minority would allow members to use any service so long as they comply with existing content rules that prohibit political or commercial endorsements in official communications.
The reason I think this is so important right now is that both the House and the Senate are currently looking to change their rules, and its vital that they get them right. I know the blogosphere knows what the right call is here, they just need to make sure that Congress gets the message. That said,
Since the initial [reaction on the blogs], however, the blogosphere has been relatively silent on the issue, which one imagines should be near and dear to its geek heart. The silence has been especially deafening from bloggers on the political left who are best positioned to influence the House Democratic leadership’s position. Pelosi spoke at this year’s Netroots Nation conference (formerly YearlyKos) and participated in an “Ask the Speaker” session. Not one question, however, related to congressional web use restrictions.
I hope you’ll spread the message about this by blogging about it, Digging the story, and generally spreading the word. This is not a partisan issue, it’s an issue on which all bloggers and technophiles can agree, and it’s definitely an issue that we can win.
Here’s a blessedly short video introducing the cost of regulation – and its equivalence to taxation. Another reason why this video is so blessed? No Dan Mitchell!
This YouTube video nearly brought me to tears. At minute 8:31, Dan Mitchell utters the words, “What matters is freedom” . . . .
Why the tears, though? Because I’d been watching and listening to Dan Mitchell for over eight minutes! You’d cry too.
Might learn something, though. It’s about Social Security taxes or something. And nobody has objected to me putting these videos up. Hey, it’s a new, exciting, “online” way of talking about public policy.
Over on the Open House Project blog, John Wonderlich ponders what would sensible web-use rules for members or Congress look like. As I’ve noted here recently, both the House and Senate are looking to update the types of restrictions they place on how their members may use internet technologies. John writes:
The question now before the Franking Commission is how to update what Pelosi and Capuano have both admitted are “antiquated” restrictions. They have to balance legitimate concerns — decorum, commercialization, and improper taxpayer funded political content — against what all involved parties have recognized as immense potential online. … What really constitutes commercial endorsement? When does conduct become unacceptable or undignified? What role should Congress play in enforcing those questions online? Where do the edges of “official duties” lie anyway? Are we treating the Internet differently than we do traditional media?
It seems to me that the first step is to separate message and medium. House and Senate rules should address what is proper and improper content—that is, they should have rules restricting the use of official resources to produce political or commercial messages or content that is undignified (however they want to define that). In fact, they already have such rules. That sort of content regulation, however, should be completely separate from restrictions on the medium used to transmit the message. As long as a member stays within the content rules, the medium should not matter.
As Cord noted here a week ago, a letter from Rep. Michael Capuano (D-Mass.) suggesting changes to Congress’s rules governing how members may post videos to the Internet stirred a firestorm of commentary that culminated in a letter from Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a New York Times article, an NPR story, and a petition effort from the Sunlight Foundation that can be found at www.LetOurCongressTweet.com. The fact that this brouhaha sparked so much activity is a sign of how important this topic is, and now that the dust has settled a bit we can look at the issue more calmly.
Despite suggestions to the contrary during the initial frenzy, the fact is that the proposed amendments would affect only video and not Twitter or blogging. Also, the proposal, which limits pretty severely where House members may post video, is actually a loosening of current rules. It’s understandable why some folks who are sensitive about online transparency pounced on this like they did, but it’s important to get the facts straight.
That said, it’s an absolute embarrassment that current House rules restrict how representatives link to outside websites. For example, I’ve talked to staff who say that while they would like to link to their member’s constantly updated voting record on GovTrack.us or the Washington Post’s Congress Votes Database, they won’t for fear of violating House rules. (The Open House Project’s report on member web-use restrictions explains in detail how the rules that govern the web and email are based on regulations developed for snail mail.)
To me, what should be the issue is the rationale for the regulations. For example, the rules proposed by Rep. Capuano would allow members to post video to outside hosting services so long as “the official content [is] not be posted on a website or page where it may appear with commercial or political information[.]” The reason seems to be that commercial or political messages anywhere in the vicinity of the official video clip would taint the “dignity, propriety, and decorum of the House.” Capuano explains in a follow-up statement:
Apparently the Republicans spreading these lies would rather operate without rules and open the House to commercialism. Maybe they don’t care if an official video appears next to a political advertisement for Barack Obama or John McCain, creating the appearance of an endorsement. And I guess they don’t care if constituents clicking on their videos will be treated to commercials for anything you can imagine, from the latest Hollywood blockbuster to Viagra. Certainly, advertisements are a reality in today’s world and most people can distinguish. However, it is also a reality that Members of Congress who use taxpayer money to communicate with constituents should be held to the highest possible standard of independence — and the appearance of independence.
Via Ellen Miller, I came to a post on techPresident lamenting corporations’ use of their customer databases to lobby Congress. Zephyr Teachout received an email from United Airlines asking her to go to a petition site which asked her to contact her member of Congress about oil speculation.
This is clearly just the beginning, and its a crude one–a few years from now you’ll see more organizing, including international organizing, to leverage corporate databases to influence policies that help corporate wealth. At least as of 2004, the airlines were among the biggest email/database owners in the country (along with casinos). As someone concerned about concentrated power in any form, this is not a great development.
I don’t think this is the unfortunate story Teachout believes it to be. More important than the fact that a corporation is using information at its disposal to advance its public policy agenda is the fact that the corporation feels obligated to communicate with Congress through the intermediary of its customers (and presumably shareholders). That’s a move in the direction of openness and democracy.
Consider the alternative: corporate officials going to Congress for meetings in smoke-filled rooms – or just showing up with bags of cash. No, there’s a dimension of modern politics that requires them to produce actual voters to support the policies they like. That’s good.
Most large corporations are publicly held so the term “corporate wealth” (assumed bad) refers to the wealth of investors and workers (in retirement funds), which is actually good.
Corporations come in every size and shape, so the formula corporate=bad fails to describe the world well. Corporations sometimes lobby for bad policies just like individuals and government agencies do. I have called out corporations with substantive policy agendas that are bad, and there are plenty. But just because an agenda is “corporate,” it isn’t necessarily bad.
Corporations lobby for freedom of speech (booksellers and publishers); they lobby for policies that keep down the cost of food (importers; agribusiness; grocers); they lobby for wind energy; etc. etc. There’s just no shorthand which holds that corporate interests are bad.
BTW, it sounds like the policies United was pitching Teachout are pretty dumb. Oil “speculation” is a hobgoblin that masks real issues of supply and demand. I hope they fail to win the day – not because they’re corporate; because they’re wrong.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.