Tomorrow, the House Homeland Security Committee is hosting a “Border Security Tech Fair.”
Vendors scheduled to participate include: Sightlogix, Scantech, Wattre, Hirsch, Bioscrypt, Cogent Systems, Cross Match, L1 Identity, Sagem Morpho, Motorola, L3 Communication, Authentec, Privaris, Mobilisa, and Lumidigm.
I don’t know all of these companies, so I made some educated guesses about the links (and I may have gotten the wrong division of Motorola), but it appears that fully 11 of the 15 participants are in the biometrics industry.
If you think for a minute that this is about the boundary line dividing the United States from its neighbors, I have a bridge to sell you. No wait – I have a “biometric solution” to sell you. Mobilisa, for example, is being used to run background checks on the citizens of Clermont County, Ohio.
Participants in the Homeland Security Committee’s lunch briefing are all in the biometrics industry. One of them, James Ziglar, wrote an op-ed in favor of a national ID in Monday’s New York Times. He claims it’s not a national ID, but then, he’s got a biometric solution to sell you.
Former IRS Commissioners Doris Meissner and James Zigler editorialize in today’s New York Times about their support for “secure, biometric Social Security cards” as an essential part of immigration law reform.
The give-away line?: “To insist on secure documents with biometric identifiers is not a call for a national ID.” They provide no logical support for this naked assertion. Because it’s false.
Strengthened “internal enforcement” of immigration law means federal surveillance and tracking of all workers. All of them. Including you.
The IRS likes to talk about how it’s primarily concerned with improving taxpayer services, particularly this time of year. But don’t be fooled. Earlier this year, the Bush Administration proposed to require “brokers” to report online sales of tangible personal property to the IRS.
This is really another giant surveillance program, like the trial balloon the administration has previously floated to require internet service providers to retain customer data to combat crimes committed against children (as I’ve discussed here and here). In both cases, the government is trying to harness the unique capacity of the Internet to identify and document conduct in ways that were never feasible nor possible before — in this case ordinary commercial transactions that just happen to be conducted online. According to press coverage, the proposal is specifically aimed at online auctions (see this and this).
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I’ll be speaking tomorrow at the Security and Liberty Forum hosted by the Privacy and Technology Committee of the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina and the Department of Computer Science, UNC-Chapel Hill.
That’s Saturday, April 14, 2007 from 1-5 p.m., Chapman Hall on the UNC Campus.
If only . . .
I welcome the critical email I recently received about my April Fool’s Day post. The discussion has some interesting provocations, but more importantly it illustrates some security/privacy thinking that more people need to get their heads around.
Here’s my critic:
As a Systems Analyst, I applaud your efforts influencing public policy on such important issues as information privacy and security. However, I strongly disagree with your tactics, and methodology. Propigating fear through disseminating false information is a terrorist style tactic and in the long run I think it does more harm then good.
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Ryan Paul at Ars has a write-up on the continuing revolt against the REAL ID Act among the states:
The New Hampshire House of Representatives voted last week to block implementation of the federal government’s controversial Real ID act. Since New Hampshire Governor John Lynch does not intend to veto the Real ID rejection bill, it will pass if approved by the state senate. Characterized by New Hampshire Representative Sherman Packard as “the worst piece of blackmail to come out of the federal government,” the Real ID Act creates a set of uniform standards for state-issued ID cards, and mandates the construction of a centralized national database to store information on American citizens…
Idaho and Maine have already passed bills rejecting implementation of the Real ID act, and similar proposed bills are being evaluated in South Carolina and Arkansas as well as New Hampshire. ACLU state legislative department director Charlie Mitchell says that this is just the beginning of a “tidal wave of rebellion against Real ID.” If enough state governments refuse to comply with the requirements of the Real ID act, it is likely that congress will have to reevaluate the entire plan. “Across the nation, local lawmakers from both parties are rejecting the federal government’s demand to undermine their constituents privacy and civil liberties with a massive unfunded mandate,” says Mitchell. “Congress must revisit the Real ID Act and fix this real mess.”
Indeed. Our own Jim Harper has been on the front lines in this fight, testifying before state legislatures and urging them to reject REAL ID. Perhaps his hard work is paying off.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately thinking and writing about the contentious issues surrounding social networking sites, age verification mandates and online child safety in general. I recently released a major PFF working paper on these issues (“Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions, No Easy Solutions“).
One of the people who has had a great deal of influence on my thinking about these matters is information security expert Jeff Schmidt, the CEO of Authis, a Reston-based authentication / identification firm. Jeff has 15 years of experience in this field and has worked for Microsoft, Ohio State University, and several other small technology companies. He is also a founder and the elected Director of the InfraGard National Members Alliance, which is the private sector component of the FBI’s InfraGard Program. (InfraGard is an FBI/private sector alliance dedicated to improving information sharing between private industry and the government on matters of national security). Jeff helped the FBI create the InfraGard Program in 1998.
So Jeff knows his stuff, and that’s what makes what he has to say about these issues–especially age verification–particularly important. Luckily, some of the essays he has penned on this subject and shared with me in the past are now online for all to see here. I thought I’d provide some highlights of the key conclusions from his papers, which are listed below:
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While I’m perusing Henley’s blog, I see his co-blogger Thoreau touched on one of my pet issues:
Yesterday I flew from Maryland to Milwaukee, where my wife and I are visiting family for the week. I was surprised to discover that I now have to pass through two machines (the air blower as well as the metal detector), not just one, and that my belt buckle now sets off metal detectors. I don’t have one of those giant ornamental belt buckles beloved of Texans, just a normal belt buckle. Yet now I have to take my belt off, along with my shoes. It wasn’t always this way, so I assume they’ve upped the sensitivity of the metal detectors.
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Links to this Drug Enforcement Administration page are traversing the blogosphere, along with instructions not to submit phony tips.
Submitting phony tips would be improper and unwise, especially if you are doing so from an IP address than can be linked back to you. You wouldn’t want to interfere with the federal government’s ever-growing usurpation of state power and its ever-more-thorough meddling in people’s business.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.