Implantable RFID chips have recently caused some privacy extremists to flip their wigs, but it’s not the privacy crisis they say. Find out why in my recent column at TechNewsWorld.
Privacy, Security & Government Surveillance 
I’ve ranted here before about the bad things that are in the intelligence reform legislation pending on Capitol Hill. As election day draws nearer without a final vote, it looks less likely that intelligence reform will pass during the pre-election posturing season.
One hopes that the lame-duck Congress will be hungry for turkey and return ever-so-briefly after the election to simply pass a resolution continuing appropriations until 2005. Kicking intelligence reform into the new Congress would be a boon.
On the national ID question, I spoke the other day at a Cato Institute event. The synopsis of what I said is: IDs provide accountability (e.g., the driver’s license) or they are issued based on risk assessment (e.g., the credit card). 1) Terrorists are willing to die so they are not accountable to worldly justice and 2) there is not a plausible risk assessment tool that can predict one-time acts of terrorism.
National IDs won’t work, but they will make Americans substantially less free, subject to far greater surveillance. (If the synopsis has failed you, watch the video.)
It is becoming increasingly clear that the Markle Foundation, a New York based non-profit, is evil. It assembled a group of people to think very carefully about anti-terrorism. The work of this group has quickly metastisized into federal Big Brother legislation.
Exhibit A: A National Surveillance Network
The Markle Foundation’s Report entitled “Building a Trusted Network for Homeland Security” advocates a program that could be called “Total Information Awareness Lite”. It got into the Senate bill to reform the intelligence system (section 207 of the Public Print). I have commented on it in an Op-Ed, and debated it vigorously in posts to Declan McCullagh’s Politech list. Here are postings number one and number two. Number three is not yet archived on the site, so it is reprinted in the extended entry below.
Exhibit Two: A National ID Card
The same intelligence reform legislation has proposals to create a national ID card system by standardizing state IDs. The source of this idea is the 9/11 Commission report (page 390), but the 9/11 Commission cites – you guessed it – the Markle Surveillance Project. In particular, it cites an Appendix written by a rump group (and I use the word advisedly).
The chief author was Amitai Etzioni, Director of the Institute for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University. He organized a panel discussion on national IDs that I appeared on back in April. After the actual panelists spoke, he invited from the audience a representative of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators to give an infomercial for national IDs. (It was broadcast on C-SPAN.)
It was all quite bizarre, but revealing: AAMVA, Markle, and many others working behind the scenes are part of the surveillance-industrial complex, working to grow the state and erode our liberties.
Much as we complain about government interference in the Internet here at home, its sobering to take a look at what’s happening abroad–most notably in China. Heritage last week released a Backgrounder by research fellow John Tkacik on “China’s Orwellian Internet,” outlining the situation there. According to the paper:
“The Internet once promised to be a conduit for uncensored information from beyond China’s borders, and for a brief, shining instant in modern Chinese history, it was a potential catalyst for political and human rights reform in China. However, for China’s 79 million Web surfers–the most educated and prosperous segment of the country’s population–the Internet is now a tool of police surveillance and official disinformation”.
It’s worth a look. And, if you missed it, you also should take a look at Adam’s excellent post on China the other day.
According to this AP report, Chinese officials are now encouraging the entire population to rat each other out to stamp out online porn.
“Some 445 people have been arrested and 1,125 Web sites shut down with the help of public tips since July,” the story notes. The Ministry of Public Security gives people rewards of $60 to $240 for becoming good little servants of the state and infomring on their fellow citizens.
It’s all quite sad, but also somewhat silly. How far can this approach really take them? As many authors noted in the last book I co-edited, Who Rules the Net? Internet Governance and Jurisdiction, these geographic-based cyber-regulatory regimes are doomed to fail in the long-run. Barring a government mandate requiring all Net traffic to flow through centralized state servers (which is the approach Saudia Arabia has adopted), there’s no way to entirely bottle up the free flow of information (especially porn!) As wireless & satellite technologies proliferate, this will certainly be the case. But even in a predominately wireline world, the censors will have their hands full.
To no one’s real surprise, the House approved the Bono spyware bill (H.R. 2929) yesterday, by a 399-1 vote. The less-comprehensive Goodlatte bill (H.R. 4661) is also expected to pass today. TLF regulars know the problems with these bills. Here’s a piece released from Heritage last week. For more vitriol, see Jim’s Harper’s vent here. I also just posted this resource page on the topic, with more links than you can shake a curser at, earlier this week.
No one, of course, really expects legislation to solve the spyware problem–the bad guys will probably escape its reach, those that can’t fall under one or another current law. And the private-sector is coming up with solutions at warp-speed. So why is Congress rushing in? The basic political problem is the “don’t stand there, do something” syndrome. It’s hard to get elected by letting markets work–its always better to have voted for a law, any law. Even if, no, especially if the problem is being solved anyway.
In any case, the whole spyware controversy may only be an opening act for a much bigger Internet privacy battle. Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy and Technology is quoted in today’s Internet Daily saying that the spyware bills is only “one of the first privacy bills we’ve had [pass] the House”, and calling for more comprehensive privacy legislation to follow. Stay tuned. The show is just beginning.
A new article on the spyware issue, just released by Heritage. I argue that while spyware is a real problem, the answer will be found in private-sector innovation, not new legislation…
No one really likes spyware. My own view is that it would be perfectly legitimate for government to ban it. The problem though, is that any legislation would likely inadvertantly hit legitimate activities and–most importantly–private-sector anti-spyware programs will in any case solve the problem far better than government. (Compare my relatively mushy position to that of fellow TLFer Jim Harper, who is trying to keep me in line on the subject.) That all said, I was a bit taken aback by Sen. George Allen’s statement (as quoted in Congress Daily) after the Senate Commerce Committee adopted spyware legislation yesterday. Congress, he declared “must come down with hobnail boots on the people who create this [spyware]”. Umm, I’m all for stopping spyware, but “hobnail boots” seems a bit too much, no? Let’s protect property rights here (and that includes cyber-property), but let’s be careful about issuing those hobnailers to regulators.
If you found this entry thanks to a Web search, you’re probably a perv. Go away!
For the rest of you, yesterday the House passed a bill to ban video voyeurism. Because it has already passed the Senate, it is likely to become law.
‘Upskirting’ with little cameras is ugly behavior, and juvenile. So do we all support a law against it? Good question.
Laws are supposed to protect people from bad things. So the most important question about anti-video voyeurism law is: Who is hurt?
Now, I’m a Web user who occassionally, purely by accident, runs across sites with vulgar content. And I’m here to tell you that ‘upskirt’ photos almost never identify whose skirt is being looked up.
In cases where a person’s identity could be determined because a face appears or a caption says “This is . . . ‘s backside,” the behavior is a clear violation of common law privacy rights. A cause of action already exists in nearly every state.
But to protect the decency and morals of the nation, should there be criminal penalties? Well, that justification has no stopping point, so I won’t abide it. On balance, the bill takes for the government a role that civil society should play: shaming and ostracizing perverts (like I did with you at the beginning of this post – why are you still reading?)
What makes this bill only minimally bad is that it applies in “the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the United States”. My understanding is that this means on federal property and within federal jurisdiction. It doesn’t establish law most places in most states. The states get to decide for themselves what’s legal and what’s not.
And the states should leave shame in place as the primary means of getting at camera-toting pervs who don’t expose identified individuals.
Technology is altering the way we do business in a host of markets, in large part because of new capabailities for acquiring and managing information. While this does create efficienices, many remain leery due to the incursions on privacy this entails. Car insurance provides a recent example. Progressive Insurance has created a pilot program for TripSense, which uses a device that plugs into a car’s onboard diagnostic port to track driver behavior.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.