Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology
This is a fascinating article about China’s censorship efforts. I thought this was a bit weird, though: “servers (short for file servers, which are essentially very large-capacity computers)” I don’t think “server” is short for anything. And I kind of thought the term had long since become common knowledge among the sort of folks who read The Atlantic.
So reports the Missoulian on the Department of Homeland Security’s capitulation in the face of Governor Schweitzer’s resolute rejection of REAL ID.
On Friday, Montana Attorney General Mike McGrath notified the Department of Homeland Security that the state will not comply with REAL ID but will pursue the identity security policies it deems appropriate. McGrath urged DHS not to penalize the state for rejecting REAL ID.
DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker chose to interpret McGrath’s letter as a request for an extension of the REAL ID compliance deadline and granted it.
In other words, DHS has abandoned any pretense that it can tell states what to do. A showdown with recalcitrant states around the May 11 compliance deadline would require the Transportation Security Administration to disrupt the passenger air travel system, something DHS evidently recognizes to be a losing proposition.
Montana wins.
More reporting at the Threat Level blog.
Over at the Cato@Liberty blog, I’ve got a longish post responding to a Center for Strategic and International Studies paper defending data mining for terrorists.
One would be right to worry about DHS Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker. He’s as smart and cagey as they come, but for all his years at the Department of Homeland Security his security thinking seems not yet to have matured. At the same time, his recollection of the REAL ID Act is showing signs of somewhat advanced age. Let’s walk through some things with our friend, Stewart.
Writing on the DHS blog in support of our national ID law, the REAL ID Act, he intones about the importance of driver’s licenses to national security. “Unfortunately,” he says, “we learned this the hard way. Twice.”:
First, in 1995, when Timothy McVeigh was able to create a fake South Dakota license with ease; all it took was a manual typewriter and a kitchen iron. He used the license to rent a Ryder truck in Oklahoma and destroy the Murrah Federal Building. Then, on September 11, 2001, eighteen of the nineteen hijackers carried government-issued IDs – mostly state driver’s licenses, many obtained fraudulently.
Over at Business Week, I take the “con” side of the question: “When considering job applicants, prospective employers have no business poking around their profiles on social networking sites.” My conclusion:
the bottom line is that a public Facebook page is just that: public. People are responsible for what they post. It’s unreasonable to make personal information available to the whole world and not expect employers to look at it. Facebook gives users the option of keeping their profiles private, and so does blogging software such as LiveJournal. Users should take advantage of these options for information they don’t want considered by potential employers. But if applicants choose to make information about themselves available to the world, they can hardly object when employers take that information into account in hiring decisions.
My worthy opponent, Greg Fish, seems to have interpreted the question in a slightly strange way. If the question had been “should employers take inaccurate or irrelevant information into account in hiring decisions,” I’d obviously agree with him. But the solution is to take online information with a grain of salt, not to avoid looking at it altogether.
Julian is doing his best to put me and my FISA writing to shame by digging into National Security Investigations & Prosecutions, an in-depth treatment of surveillance law.
Just minutes after writing this post, which relied on Valleywag’s recounting of a paywalled WSJ story, I came across a link to the actual case.
The actual case says (at page 12): “There was no error in excluding the classified information.” Valleywag’s version: “The appeals court agreed that classified documents related to those negotiations were improperly excluded.” (For you non-lawyers, that is the opposite.)
But the circuit court’s analysis is awfully interesting, and I think it’s wrong. I’ll copy the whole thing because it’s so brief and then run it past some analysis of insider trading law:
Via Valleywag – and unbelievably I’m relying on Valleywag for hard news – former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio will get a new trial after the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that evidence was properly excluded from his trial. Nacchio claims that he expected income from government contracts but the contracts were canceled when his company declined to comply with government demands for customer information. The trial court didn’t allow this allegation into evidence.
As I speculated last October, the administration is probably working so assiduously on immunity for telecom firms because the telecoms have information about yet more administration surveillance activities than has been revealed to date. Nacchio’s new trial may bring some of this information to light.
Update: Sure enough, Valleywag is not reliable.
Chris Soghoian has an important post on the C|Net News blog examining a Google statement to him about whether it has facilitated or participated in government surveillance.
In response to Chris’ question, “Is Google sharing ‘huge volumes’ of search records with the government?”, a Google spokesperson said, “Google was not part of the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program.”
That’s answer that should peg anyone’s non-denial denial detector. Google should be more direct and forthcoming.
Look at that. Another example of the “so-called ‘libertarians’ and their complete and total absence during our FISA fight.” Seriously, Julian’s got a great piece in the LA Times:
In the FISA debate, Bush administration officials oppose any explicit rules against “reverse targeting” Americans in conversations with noncitizens, though they say they’d never do it. But Lyndon Johnson found the tactic useful when he wanted to know what promises then-candidate Richard Nixon might be making to our allies in South Vietnam through confidant Anna Chenault. FBI officials worried that directly tapping Chenault would put the bureau “in a most untenable and embarrassing position,” so they recorded her conversations with her Vietnamese contacts. Johnson famously heard recordings of King’s conversations and personal liaisons with various women. Less well known is that he received wiretap reports on King’s strategy conferences with other civil rights leaders, hoping to use the information to block their efforts to seat several Mississippi delegates at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Johnson even complained that it was taking him “hours each night” to read the reports.
Read the whole thing; Julian describes similar abuses in the Harding, Truman, Kennedy, and Nixon administrations. While I certainly hope that Presidents Obama, Clinton, or McCain wouldn’t do anything like this, it would be naive to enact legislation that requires us to simply trust them.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
