Privacy, Security & Government Surveillance

Here’s an interesting glimpse into the attitudes of career law enforcement bureaucrats towards civil liberties:

Since the Patriot Act, the FBI has dispersed the authority to sign national security letters to more than five dozen supervisors — the special agents in charge of field offices, the deputies in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, and a few senior headquarters officials. FBI rules established after the Patriot Act allow the letters to be issued long before a case is judged substantial enough for a “full field investigation.” Agents commonly use the letters now in “preliminary investigations” and in the “threat assessments” that precede a decision whether to launch an investigation. “Congress has given us this tool to obtain basic telephone data, basic banking data, basic credit reports,” said Caproni, who is among the officials with signature authority. “The fact that a national security letter is a routine tool used, that doesn’t bother me.” If agents had to wait for grounds to suspect a person of ill intent, said Joseph Billy Jr., the FBI’s deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, they would already know what they want to find out with a national security letter. “It’s all chicken and egg,” he said. “We’re trying to determine if someone warrants scrutiny or doesn’t.”

I have no doubt he’s right that being able to demand peoples’ personal information virtually on a whim makes investigations go a lot more easily. But as the saying goes, only in a police state is a policeman’s work easy.

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Yesterday, the Idaho Senate passed Joint Memorial 3, earlier approved unanimously by the House, to refuse implementation of the REAL ID Act.  More info here. 

I testified on the bill in the Idaho House’s Transportation and Defense Committee, and participated in a panel discussion at the Idaho statehouse, where some common sense was heard.

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You don’t have to look far over the horizon to know what life in America would be like if we had a national ID.  On Saturday, the Associated Press reported that a mall in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin is considering requiring ID from youths before they can enter.  This decision would be much easier if there was a nationally uniform ID system.

With IDs and credentials of different designs and from different issuers in our hands today, ID checking is relatively rare, and rarely automated.  Nonetheless, companies like Intelli-Check are pushing electronic ID-checking systems for nanny-state purposes. They would have a much easier time if all of us carried the same card and it was effectively mandatory.  Keep in mind that more ID checking equals more personal data collection.

In tiny Earlville, Illinois, a woman named Joy Robinson-Van Gilder has started a one-woman crusade against her local public school which decided to use fingerprint biometrics to administer the purchase of hot lunches in the cafeteria.  Despite her wishes, they fingerprint scanned her 7-year-old, for a time refusing to allow him hot lunches if he wouldn’t use their system. 

The starting point for this kind of program is using it to manage lunch payments, but the ending point is a detailed record of each child’s eating habits and the school usurping the role of parents.  It’s no wonder government schools are at the center of so much social conflict.

There is nothing inherently wrong with identification or with biometrics but, unless they are adopted through voluntary choice, they will be designed to serve institutions and not people.

(Cross-posted from Cato@Liberty)

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The Department of Homeland Security issued regulations to implement the REAL ID Act today. Well, it issued regulations to delay implementation, anyway. The regs really don’t explain anything in this fundamentally flawed national ID law. They just kick the can down the road.

I’ll compile here some links to Cato@Liberty blog posts about what I’ve been up to. Apologies to C@L readers forced to slog through my meanderings twice.

First of all, it’s interesting to watch the slow-motion collapse of so many government ID programs because they are so poorly designed and poorly thought through.

That isn’t stopping politicians from trying to shore them up. Representative Barbara Cubin (R-WY), for example, has been misdirecting her state’s legislators about what the law says.

I originally thought that Senator Collins (R-ME) was confused about REAL ID. Her state was the first to pass legislation rejecting REAL ID, so you would think she would not try to help force states to implement a national ID. But it now is quite clear that Senator Collins (R-DHS) supports REAL ID.

The people who know what they’re talking about are folks like George Smith up in Maine and – my very favorite – Bill Bishop, the Director of the Idaho Bureau of Homeland Security. Summarizing REAL ID’s utility as a national security tool, Bishop said: “I don’t believe in the Easter Bunny, I don’t believe in Santa Claus, and I don’t believe in the Lone Ranger. Which means I don’t believe in silver bullets.”

Look for the forthcoming podcast on REAL ID (and other cool stuff), right here on TLF.

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Legislation in the House of Representatives would require Internet service providers to store subscriber data specified by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales. The Attorney General would also get to decide how long the data would be stored. The bill, H.R. 837, provides:

SEC. 6. RECORD RETENTION REQUIREMENTS FOR INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDERS. (a) Regulations- Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this section, the Attorney General shall issue regulations governing the retention of records by Internet Service Providers. Such regulations shall, at a minimum, require retention of records, such as the name and address of the subscriber or registered user to whom an Internet Protocol address, user identification or telephone number was assigned, in order to permit compliance with court orders that may require production of such information. (b) Failure To Comply- Whoever knowingly fails to retain any record required under this section shall be fined under title 18, United States Code, and imprisoned for not more than one year, or both.

Giving law enforcement the tools to protect our children and put creeps behind bars obviously sounds appealing. And I gather it polls very well in Republican suburbs, too. But as I have pointed out here, the real problem is inadequate prison terms for child molesters and the fact that, once released, child molesters have been allowed to evade registration and notification requirements. Data retention is an attempt to outsource the enforcement and supervision burden.

Continue reading →

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TLF contributor Jim Harper squares off with a national ID advocate on MSNBC:

I find Joan Messner’s argument baffling. “If the terrorists had not had drivers licenses, there probably would not have been an attack on 9/11,” she says. True enough. But what does that have to do with anything?

The point is that at the point when the 9/11 terrorist applied for drivers licenses, they hadn’t done anything illegal. They got their drivers licenses the same way the rest of us do: they went to the DMV and signed up for them. It’s not obvious on what basis we could or should have denied them licenses.

So Messner’s argument just seems like a non sequitur. I don’t see any way that a more secure drivers license would prevent another 9/11. Can anyone explain how this argument is supposed to work?

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