Hmmm.. This sounds like trouble waiting to happen for kids in the UK. According to News.com:
British students aged 14 to 19 will have their school records permanently placed on an electronic database accessible to prospective employers. The project, called Managing Information Across Partners (MIAP), will launch in September. The record will include personal details and exam results and will remain with the pupil for life.
[…]
The system will be based on a Unique Learner Number. “The Unique Learner Number, necessary to acquire a learner record for the diploma is a unique identifier that can be used by a learner for life,” MIAP said on its Web site. “It is a national number that is validated and is therefore deemed to be unique.” The aim is to expand the system to include other information and to allow details already available but scattered across many databases to be brought together, it said.” The pupil would have control over the record and would be able to restrict the information shared.
Maybe. Or maybe not. As the story goes on to point out:
Continue reading →
This ad from the Republican National Committee has been making the rounds inside the beltway over the last week:
http://www.youtube.com/v/dWIn-S6W5pg&rel=1&border=1
The ad is chock-full of misleading, scare-mongering claims, most of which I’ve already addressed. But of course, the point of this ad isn’t education, but intimidation. The message is that Democrats who don’t fall in line behind the president’s warrantless surveillance agenda will face similar attack ads in the fall elections.
But as the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out, this tactic has already been tried, and it failed miserably. In the 2006 elections, incumbent Nancy Johnson used an ad with a virtually identical message to ward off challenger Chris Murphy. The ad backfired, sparking newspapers to editorialize that it was “desperate” and a “fraud.” Murphy returned fire with an ad quoting these editorials and arguing that Johnson would say anything to stay in power.
The rule of law and judicial oversight of domestic spying are bedrock principles of our system of government. There is no reason Democrats (or Republicans, for that matter) should be afraid to run on those principles in November. Capitulating to the president’s demands on this issue would not only undermine our civil liberties, but it would also miss a key opportunity to draw a clear contrast with an unpopular president.
Democrats are constantly complaining about the fact that they’re seen by voters as weak on national security issues. Perhaps their constant capitulation to the president’s demands is part of the problem. Democrats are never going to win elections by presenting themselves as being just as willing to shred the constitution. In the first place, no one will believe them, and in the second place, why would you vote for the imitation when you can vote for the original? Democrats are only going to win on national security when they’re willing to say something
different from the Republicans. This, it seems to me, is a golden opportunity. It allows them to stake out a clear position: “yes to eavesdropping on terrorists, no to eavesdropping on innocent Americans, and no to allowing big telecom companies to break the law.”
As luck would have it, I’ve got two new pieces out today on two very different privacy debates. First, in the latest issue of TechKnowledge, which is based on my Computing in the Cloud talk, I argue that privacy policy should be focused on empowering consumers to make their own decisions about privacy tradeoffs, rather than having government bureaucrats decide which information companies should collect and how it can be used. I discuss three cases—cookies, GMail, and Facebook’s newsfeed—where initial privacy concerns turned out to be overblown, and one—Beacon—where they weren’t.
Second, in a new piece for
Reason, I chide Democrats for capitulating on civil liberties. I point out that Congress wasn’t always so spineless:
Bush’s predecessor was also an ardent supporter of increased wiretapping authority. For example, on July 29, 1996, Bill Clinton unveiled a proposal to expand government surveillance by permitting the use of “roving wiretaps.” The nation was still reeling from terrorist attacks on the Atlanta Olympics and American barracks in Saudi Arabia, and many suspected that the explosion of TWA Flight 800 was also the work of terrorists. Clinton argued that these tragedies highlighted the need for legislative changes, and he pressed Congress to act before its August recess.
But Congress had a bipartisan tradition of its own to defend. As they had done since Watergate, Congressional leaders raised concerns about civil liberties. Then-Speaker Newt Gingrich said he was willing to consider changes to the law, but vowed to do so “in a methodical way that preserves our freedoms.” Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott vowed that Congress would not “rush to a final judgment” before going on vacation. In the end, the 104th Congress finished its term without giving President Clinton the wiretapping authority he sought.
It’s a little depressing that Harry Reid is less concerned with civil liberties than Trent Lott was a decade ago.
Last week, I published an Op-Ed in the Detroit News predicting chaos at the border in the face of ramped up document checks. I was wrong.
In fact, the DHS was bluffing. Border crossers who lacked government-issued photo ID and proof of citizenship like birth certificates or naturalization certificates weren’t prevented from crossing. They were given fliers.
As the AP reports:
Bobby and Genice Bogard of Greers Ferry, Ark., . . . who winter in Mission, Texas, knew the requirements were coming but thought they took effect in June. So even though they have U.S. passports, they had left them at home.
“He allowed us to pass with a driver’s license,” Bobby Bogard said of a border agent.
“But next time he said he wouldn’t,” added Genice Bogard.
Hosted on the Web site of Orange County NORML (make of that what you will), a clever illustration of how we’re being “given” security by so many government programs:
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Today’s Cato Daily Podcast features yours truly discussing the FISA debate [MP3] and Congress’s recent extension of the Protect America Act. The Daily podcast is a great show. I listen to it regularly. If you listen to podcasts, you should sign up for it.
Tennessee has a proposal to create a “Tennessee community conscious Internet provider” seal to be awarded by the consumer affairs division. A bill introduced in the Tennessee General Assembly – HB 2530 – would award a seal to ISPs that:
1) retain IP addresses for 2 years;
I’ll soon have a paper out on “electronic employment eligibility verification.” This is the idea of requiring every employer in the country to check the immigration status of employees against Department of Homeland Security and Social Security Administration databases.
A nationwide EEV program, building on the current Basic Pilot/”E-Verify” program, was treated as a matter of near consensus at the beginning of this past summer’s immigration debate, and the Department of Homeland Security continues to promote it.
My paper goes into the practical and technical problems with a full-fledged EEV system, as well as the question whether such a thing is appropriate for a free country. But I’ve already become aware of problems I didn’t think of.
A law went in to effect in Arizona January 1st requiring all employers to use the E-Verify system. The Arizona Republic reports that just 17,000 of the state’s 150,000 businesses have signed up for E-Verify. (January is a slow month for hiring, but employers may be holding off on hiring too. And a lawsuit has been brought challenging the Arizona law.)
Among employers using E-Verify, the question has arisen what to do when an employee has worked for a few days, but then is deemed ineligible by the database. Should the employee who is either an illegal immigrant are a citizen with bad paperwork be paid? “[E]mployers could look for workers who are at risk of failing E-Verify, the online database that checks employment eligibility, and fire those workers without paying them for up to three days of labor,” says the report.
The simple idea of “internal enforcement” of immigration law using employers as Border Patrol agents turns out not to be so simple. E-Verify puts fair-minded employers between a rock and a hard place, while facilitating unscrupulous behavior by others.
“Please note that participation in the grant proposal effort does not constitute a commitment by your jurisdiction to be REAL ID compliant.”
That’s an assurance the heads of the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators give to state DMV bureaucrats in a January 14 letter asking them to participate in a grant proposal for REAL ID implementation money.
This means that motor vehicle bureacrats in states that have categorically refused to participate in the national ID system may go ahead and build it anyway, thanks to AAMVA and “free” federal money.
Then they will wait around for the political alignments to change. They may not even wait, as they’ve trained up to lobby for it.
Your tax dollars at work.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.