Yesterday, the immigration reform bill stumbled over the bill’s REAL ID provisions, which attempt to revive the moribund U.S. national ID system. Apparently, REAL ID does not enjoy the support of a majority of Senators.
Though Senate procedure is quite murky to me, apparently the Baucus-Tester amendment, to strip REAL ID-related requirements from the immigration bill (being considered as one division of an omnibus amendment known as a “clay pigeon”), was the subject of a motion to table. (“Tabling” an amendment means setting it aside indefinitely, which usually means forever.) The motion failed.
Several Senators who support overall immigration reform voted against tabling the amendment. This means that including the REAL ID provisions in the bill is enough to kill it.
Though only time and further machinations will tell, it looks like REAL ID-based internal enforcement can not be a part of any immigration law reform bill that gets through Congress.
That’s good news for all the native born, law-abiding Americans who would have been treated as suspects and made subject to surveillance in a vain attempt to get at illegal aliens.
Update: It appears that a cloture vote on the bill has failed, meaning the Senate is not prepared to continue with the bill. The inclusion of REAL ID killed immigration reform.
Here’s the first reporting I’ve seen on Title III of the Senate immigration bill. San Francisco Chronicle reporter Carolyn Lochhead writes:
A government that cannot issue passports to 3 million U.S. citizens in time for summer holidays is expected to create a vast work-authorization system for more than 7 million U.S. employers and eventually all 146 million U.S. workers that is quick, accurate and safe.
Up to now, there has been almost no public discussion, much less analysis, of this part of the Senate bill, though the House Immigration Subcommittee
held a hearing on issues in electronic employment elgibility verification in April. There,
I testified on the privacy and civil liberties concerns with such a system. Even yesterday, though, Senator Ted Kennedy appearing on Fox News Sunday touted the strong employment eligibility verification system in the Senate bill.
Broad immigration reform is needed, especially with increased legal avenues for immigration, but electronic employment eligibility verification will fail. The only question is how much damage will be done to law-abiding Americans’ privacy in the process.
Identity card producer Digimarc has hired Janice Kephart to lobby for the REAL ID Act. That doesn’t surprise me. Indeed, I assumed she was working for them.
Kephart has worked to cash in on her service to the 9/11 Commission by opening a boutique ‘security’ lobbying firm. In my testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, I characterized her as part of the “do-overs” school of REAL ID advocacy. ‘If we could just do 9/11 again, maybe someone would have gotten suspicious and stopped the attack.’
The article in the Portland Business Journal about it was interesting because it points out that Digimarc is a Beaverton, Oregon company. And look at who is one of the few governors in the country supporting REAL ID: Ted Kulongoski of Oregon!
Worried about national security? Immigration control? Identity fraud? No, the governor is working to help an in-state company feed from the federal trough.
The very Department of Homeland Security that is seeking to require states to collect and share information on every driver and state ID card holder, including scanned copies of their birth certificates, “suffered more than 800 hacker break-ins, virus outbreaks and other computer security problems over two years, senior officials acknowledged to Congress.”
In one instance, hacker tools for stealing passwords and other files were found on two internal Homeland Security computer systems. The agency’s headquarters sought forensic help from the department’s own Security Operations Center and the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team it operates with Carnegie Mellon University.
In other cases, computer workstations in the Coast Guard and the Transportation Security Administration were infected with malicious software detected trying to communicate with outsiders; laptops were discovered missing; and agency Web sites suffered break-ins.
From Derek Slater:
A judge ordered [PDF] the FBI today to finally release agency records about its abuse of National Security Letters (NSLs) to collect Americans’ personal information. The ruling came just a day after the EFF urged [PDF] the judge to immediately respond in its lawsuit over agency delays.
EFF sued the FBI in April for failing to respond to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about the misuse of NSLs as revealed in a Justice Department report. As we noted yesterday, more evidence of abuse was uncovered by the Washington Post, and EFF urged the judge Thursday to force the FBI to stop stalling the release of its records on the deeply flawed program.
I bet we’ll learn all sorts of interesting things from these records!
Nothing like a clever turn of phrase to capture and popularize an idea. At TechCrunch, Duncan Riley has come up with “American Tracking & Takedown.”
Google’s mapping service just introduced a new feature called “Street View,” offering detailed photos of addresses in San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Denver and Miami. While the company might not be breaking any privacy laws, the service raises concerns that need to be addressed.
The photographs are not live and were taken from a device with multiple cameras attached to a car that drove down each available street. The problem for some is that the cameras took photos of people not expecting to be photographed and broadcast across the Net. There are photos of women sunbathing at Stanford University, a man caught urinating in San Bruno, Calif., and a very clear picture of a woman’s thong underwear as she was getting into her truck.
Google argues that the photos are “no different from what any person can readily capture or see walking down the street.” That’s true if you can see the image for a few minutes and then it disappears, or if it is a random photo from a camera phone posted online. However, that’s not how it works.
[…]
Read more here.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.