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Assessing the Claim that CDT Opposes a National ID
It was good of Ari Schwartz to respond last week to my recent post querying whether the Center for Democracy and Technology outright opposes a national ID or simply “does not support” one.
Ari says CDT does oppose a national ID, and I believe that he honestly believes that. But it’s worth taking a look at whether the group’s actions are consistent with opposition to a national ID. I believe CDT’s actions — most recently its support of the PASS ID Act — support the creation of a national ID.
(The title of his post and some of his commentary suggest I have engaged in rhetorical excess and mischaracterized his views. Please do judge for yourself whether I’m being shrill or unfair, which is not my intention.)
First I want to address an unusual claim of Ari’s — that we already have a national ID system. If that is true, his support for PASS ID is more sensible because it is an opportunity to inject federal privacy protections into the existing system (putting aside whether it is a federal responsibility to manage a state system or systems).
Filed under: Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Review of the Big REAL ID Hearing
The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee held a hearing yesterday on the REAL ID Act and the REAL ID revival bill, known as PASS ID. I attended and want to share with you some highlights.
Good News!
Little good came from the hearing, as it was primarily focused on how to get the states and people to accept a national ID. But there is some good news.
First, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano declared REAL ID dead (much as I did in my testimony two-plus years ago). “DOA” is how she referred to it.
She also said that no state will be in compliance with REAL ID by the current December 31, 2009 deadline. This is important because a lot of people think that states doing anything about the security of drivers’ licenses and ID cards are complying with REAL ID.
Another highlight was the commentary of Senator Roland Burris (D-IL). He is a beleaguered outsider to the Senate and evidently wasn’t coached on the talking points around REAL ID and PASS ID. So he flat out asked why we shouldn’t just have “a national ID.”
Senator Susan Collins’ (R-ME) nervous smile was particularly noticeable when Burris asked why the emperor had no clothes. No one was supposed to talk about national IDs at this hearing! But that’s what PASS ID is.
REAL ID and PASS ID are two versions of the same national ID system, and nobody is denying it. That’s good news because the effort to rebrand REAL ID through PASS ID has failed.
Who’s Blogging about Cato
Here’s the latest round-up of bloggers who are writing about, citing and linking to Cato research and commentary:
- Blogging about Real ID, AxXiom for Liberty posted Jim Harper’s piece about DHS officials who skirted open meeting laws to promote the program.
- The Club for Growth’s Andrew Roth interviewed Cato Chairman Bob Levy about his book, The Dirty Dozen.
- No Land Grab, a blog covering eminent domain abuse, posted the latest Cato video on the Susette Kelo case. Jason Pye, who wrote a commentary on the case for the Georgia Public Policy Foundation, linked to it as well.
- Sights on Pennsylvania blogged about international health care systems, citing Michael D. Tanner’s January article on health care reform and a 2008 Hill Briefing that compared various systems around the world.
- Wes Messamore, AKA The Humble Libertarian, is compiling a list of 100 libertarian blogs/Web sites, and looking for recommendations. Last week, Wes penned his thoughts on the role of the U.S. in foreign policy, making heavy use of a recent Cato article by Benjamin Friedman and a 1998 foreign policy brief by Ivan Eland, citing military intervention overseas as a cause of terrorist activity against Americans.
- David Kirkpatrick shared an excerpt from the Cato Weekly Dispatch with his readers about Obama’s marijuana policy.
If you’re blogging about Cato, contact Chris Moody at cmoody@cato.org.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Foreign Policy and National Security; General; Government and Politics
Harper: One to Watch in 2009
I’m pleased and humbled to have been named one of the Ars Technica/Tech Policy Central “People to Watch” in 2009. Along with my opposition to the REAL ID national identification scheme, they cite my work opposing the E-Verify national worker background check system (which would ultimately require a national ID).
Considering how the economic stimulus bill may be a vehicle for mandating broader use of E-Verify, the first thing you might see from watching me in 2009 might be an angry and disappointed advocate for liberty.
“Secure” Government Databases?
From the Columbus Dispatch:
Information on [Joe "the Plumber"] Wurzelbacher was accessed by accounts assigned to the office of Ohio Attorney General Nancy H. Rogers, the Cuyahoga County Child Support Enforcement Agency and the Toledo Police Department.
The security of information about you in government databases is contingent on you keeping your head down. Something to keep in mind when advocates for the REAL ID Act (national ID program) and the E-Verify national background check system come a-calling.
Passport Snooping Scandal Grows
From the Washington Post:
Government workers repeatedly snooped without authorization inside the electronic passport records of entertainers, athletes and other high-profile Americans, a State Department audit has found. One celebrity’s records were breached 356 times by more than six dozen people.
The Inspector General compiled a list of popular and interesting people, then examined the number of accesses to their files.
As the investigation continues down the chain — and it should — it is very likely to find that ordinary citizens’ data was accessed too — not out of curiosity, but for the purposes of committing identity theft. More than 20,000 people in the State Department and Department of Homeland Security had access to the electronic system that maintained the passport records. There’s a bad seed or two in any group that size.
The IG has issued numerous recommendations for improvement, likely things that should have been implemented long ago. But know one thing: Security risks like this are an inseparable product of government policies that collect personal information in databases and then make it widely accessible. Proponents of national ID systems like REAL ID and the nationwide government background check system envisioned by E-Verify may dream about them being secure, but it’s just a dream.
More on passport snooping here and here.
Filed under: Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Family Security Matters: REAL ID = National ID
A month ago, I wrote here and in a TechKnowledge article about the telling imagery that a company called L-1 Identity Solutions had used in some promotional materials. The cover of their REAL ID brochure featured an attractive woman’s face with her driver license data superimposed over it, along with her name, address, height, eye color, place of birth, political affiliation, and her race. This is where the national ID system advanced by the REAL ID Act leads.
Here’s another example. A group called Family Security Matters has reprinted on its site a blog post supporting the $80 million in grant money that the Department of Homeland Security recently announced, seeking to prop up the REAL ID Act. (I’ve written about it here and here.)
What’s interesting is not that a small advocacy group should support REAL ID, but the image they chose to illustrate their thinking: a man holding his “National Identity Card,” his fingerprint and iris images printed on it, and presumably programmed into it.
Were there ever any doubt that REAL ID was a national identity system and a step toward cradle-to-grave, government-mandated biometric tracking, Family Security Matters has helped clear that up.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Nuclear Smuggling Ring Had Advanced Plans – This Relates to Your Privacy
A year ago, in some jest, I announced a new law (as in “of physics”) on the TechLiberationFront blog. “Harper’s Law” states, “The security and privacy risks increase proportionally to the square of the number of users of the data.” This rule generalizes to all information in digital form, and the suspected release of nuclear plans to the A.Q. Khan nuclear smuggling ring illustrates this well.
It is very difficult to control digital information – on any subject and in any context. It’s like a volatile gas: once it escapes whatever container or capsule you may have enclosed it in, you’re not getting it back. (Well, you’ll still have it but you won’t be able to deprive others from having it.) Nuclear plans, bomb-making plans, and the like will be very hard to contain, and relying on control of this kind of information for national or homeland security will be an unreliable protection.
Likewise, a poor way to protect privacy is to rely on rules about how information is used after it has been collected. If you really want privacy, you must never reveal the information you want to keep private. I’ve written a couple of times where various public officials have sought to redefine privacy so that it is consistent with their having access to personal information. Can’t be done.
In close relation are the large, personal-information-intensive programs that the federal government has been trying to develop. For example, our national ID law, the REAL ID Act, would put sensitive personal information and scanned identity documents into nationally accessible databases. Yet identity security requires keeping much of this information from being public. You can’t have both.
E-Verify would use names paired with Social Security Numbers as identifiers in a national immigration background check system, yet it would rely on the inaccessibility of this information to the public for security against fraud. Can’t happen. (DHS is seeking access to Americans’ driver’s license and passport pictures, hoping to shore up this weakness, but watch for all the new problems that emerge when digital copies of the photographs on our identity documents escape into the wild.)
Harper’s Law extends to other issue areas as well, like copyright. It is very hard for copyrights in popular content to be enforced, and it will get harder. Artists and the entertainment industry are in a real bind trying to control access to information that they must also widely distribute. See Cato Unbound’s “Future of Copyright” discussion, going on now, for more interesting thinking in this area.
There you have it: advanced nuclear plans, databases of personal information, and copyright law are all peas in a pod to me.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Foreign Policy and National Security; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
L-1: The Technology Company in Your Pocket
Inspired by the promotional brochure I recently came across, I’ve taken a look at L-1 Identity Solutions in a new Cato TechKnowledge. Though it has better options, L-1 and its new acquisition, Digimarc ID Systems, seem likely to continue lobbying for the REAL ID Act. My concluding line: “A corporate lobbying operation can do as much harm to liberty as any government agency or official.”
Filed under: Cato Publications; Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Stewart Baker Should Start at the Beginning
Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary for Policy Stewart Baker has posted the second in a series on the REAL ID Act at the DHS Leaderhip blog. I assessed his first try here.
This one raises the privacy issues with REAL ID, and it claims that privacy advocates “can’t and won’t tell you precisely how REAL ID threatens privacy.” Knowing his smarts and savvy, I’m confident that Stewart is feigning unawareness of my book Identity Crisis and the hearings in Congress that have exposed the many threats to privacy from REAL ID specifically, and national ID systems generally. He has also had the opportunity to read the DHS Privacy Committee’s report, which cited and discussed “serious risks” to privacy from the REAL ID program.
It’s true that privacy is a complex subject, and the complexity is preserved by the fact that a number of different interests are often lumped together under the “privacy” heading. But Stewart has certainly had the opportunity to read the Privacy Committee’s “framework document,” which articulates each of these interests. For a more thorough study of privacy in its strongest sense (control over personal information), he could re-read (or perhaps just read) my 2004 study “Understanding Privacy—and the Real Threats to It.”
The claim that privacy advocates won’t articulate the privacy problems with REAL ID is a shift from earlier public comments where Baker reportedly expressed puzzlement about privacy concerns with REAL ID, or his failure to understand them. One can’t be puzzled by the privacy concerns with REAL ID at one point in time and later claim that privacy concerns haven’t been articulated. There’s something else afoot.
I suspect it’s the fact that Baker gives higher priority to implementing REAL ID than to protecting Americans’ privacy. He just can’t bring himself to say so because it wouldn’t be popular or politic. (To be clear: He makes claims that REAL ID will protect privacy, but they do not pass muster.)
Baker should address the privacy consequences of REAL ID in a way that is not feigned ignorance or dismissiveness, but he should do something else first: Tell us what REAL ID is good for. The burden of proof in the debate over REAL ID is not on privacy advocates to say why not, but on proponents of the national ID law to say why.
No proponent of REAL ID, including Stewart Baker, has ever articulated how the program will cost-effectively secure the country against any threat. In fact, the Department of Homeland Security declined to articulate how REAL ID works to benefit the country in its analysis of the REAL ID regulations it issued. This is something I discussed, along with the privacy concerns, in my May 2007 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee:
The Department of Homeland Security has had two years to articulate how REAL ID would work. But the cost-benefit analysis provided in the proposed rules issued in March . . . helps show that implementing REAL ID would impose more costs on our society than it would provide security or other benefits. REAL ID would do more harm than good.
This is true if you assign no value to privacy at all. Americans do value their privacy and civil liberties, but the conversation should start at the beginning–with an articulation from Stewart Baker of how REAL ID provides cost-effective security.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Australian National ID Card Abandoned
This somewhat cryptic blog post at Wired reflects the delight of Roger Clarke that the Australian national ID card has been dropped by the incoming government. Clarke wrote an article in 1994 that is probably fairly regarded as the foundation of identification theory. I expanded on his thinking in my book, Identity Crisis.
In related news, Montana Senators Max Baucus and Jon Tester put language prohibiting the expenditure of federal funds for development of a national ID card in the omnibus spending bill Congress passed last week. Because the Department of Homeland Security denies that REAL ID is a national ID, this language is probably hortatory during the current administration.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties; Telecom, Internet & Information Policy
Cato and the ‘Republican Tent’
Justin is quite right to object to John Quiggin’s charge that Cato has somehow soft-pedalled its opposition to the the Iraq war. But I wanted to also object to his comment about Cato “remaining within the Republican tent,” which I personally found even more aggravating.
There certainly are a few issues where Cato scholars have agreed with the White House, with Social Security reform and immigration being the most obvious examples. But there are also plenty of examples of Cato scholars sharply criticizing the White House and the Republican leadership. Here is Cato’s Neal McCluskey criticizing the president’s signature education policy initiative. Here is a Cato paper criticizing the Republicans’ expansion of Medicare. Here are two books criticizing the Republicans for abandoning their small-govenment roots. Here is Gene Healy and Tim Lynch’s devastating brief on the Bush administration’s civil liberties record. Here is a critique of the GOP’s Federal Marriage Amendment. Here is a podcast of yours truly opposing the White House’s stance on warrantless wiretaps. Here is Cato’s Jim Harper arguing against the REAL ID Act, which is backed by the White House. Here are repeated critiques of the Republicans’ pork-laden energy bill. Here is Cato’s Roger Pilon arguing for lifting the ban on “drug reimportation,” a ban the White House supported.
I could go on, but you get the idea. And that’s in addition to all the foreign policy work Justin already noted. Cato scholars criticize Republican policymakers constantly. We are not, and have never sought to be, “within the Republican tent.” Unfortunately, partisanship seems to have so curdled public discourse that many on the political left seem to reflexively assume that anyone who’s not in “the Democratic tent” must ipso facto be in the Republican tent. Even a cursory review of our recent work makes it clear that’s not true.
Harpers Denounce Border Plan, ID Systems
A prominent Harper spoke out this week against the plan to require passports or passport-’lite’ ID cards for crossing the U.S.-Canada border. That’s Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
He is no relation to the Cato Institute’s director of information policy studies, Jim Harper, who spoke out about the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative’s PASS card system two weeks ago.
The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative (WHTI) sounds like a wonderful thing. It’s hard to be against travel. But WHTI is actually about shrinking commerce and travel among the friendly countries in our region.
In the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, Congress pushed the Department of Homeland Security to create an “automated biometric entry and exit data system” for people crossing the borders. A prominent proposal is the PASS card, which stands for People Access Security Service. It is envisioned as a card containing an RFID chip that is to be given to passport holders. The chip would alert the DHS when a person arrives at a border crossing.
“Pre-positioning” data by sending an electronic signal from 30 or more feet sounds like it would make border crossings go faster. But moving identification data is not what takes time at border crossings — it’s checking to see if the person and the identity information match up.
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