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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.
Cato Today
White Paper: “How Did we Get into This Financial Mess?,” by Lawrence H. White
The actual causes of our financial troubles were unusual monetary policy moves and novel federal regulatory interventions. These poorly chosen policies distorted interest rates and asset prices, diverted loanable funds into the wrong investments, and twisted normally robust financial institutions into unsustainable positions.
Op-Ed: “Eliminate U.S. Presence,” by Christopher A. Preble in USA Today
Iraq always was, and still is, a war of choice. The U.S. should choose to terminate the mission and refocus its attention — and, where appropriate, its still-strong military — on the enemies who struck on 9/11.
Op-Ed: “Don’t Dump on Free Trade,” by Ilya Shapiro in Legal Times
On Tuesday, Nov. 4, while most of the country understandably had its attention elsewhere, the Court heard argument in United States v. Eurodif. The case is an appeal from a ruling of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit holding that contracts with foreign companies to enrich uranium are outside the scope of U.S. anti-dumping law (and their corresponding tariffs) because they’re “service” as opposed to “sales” contracts.
The decision reversed the Commerce Department’s determination to the contrary and prompted a petition for certiorari from United States Enrichment Corp., a government spinoff that dominates the domestic enrichment market and would be hurt by competition from abroad. Although the U.S. solicitor general also requested cert (in which circumstance review is not uncommon), Eurodif is the first time the Court has accepted an international trade case in six years (and only the eighth time in the last two decades).
Podcast: “Obama Should Scrap E-Verify,” featuring Jim Harper
Filed under: Cato Publications; Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
“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
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
Howley on E-Verify
Kerry Howley has a great article on the supposedly common-sense proposal to create a massive federal database of eligible workers as a disincentive to illegal immigration:
While undocumented workers probably contribute more in federal taxes than they consume in federal services, no one doubts that they pose some fiscal burden to border communities where they arrive. Still, you’d have to take an improbably extreme view of these costs to deem the SAVE Act fiscally rational. According to the Congressional Budget Office (pdf), the act would decrease federal revenues by $17.3 billion between 2009 and 2018 as formerly tax-paying workers go underground. The costs of expanding E-verify and a bunch of other goodies stuffed into SAVE (thousands more border agents, a program to recruit former members of the armed forces to join the border patrol, more SUVs and unmanned aerial vehicles, hundreds of full time immigration investigators, expanded immigration detention centers) come to $23.4 billion in discretionary spending during the same period. And that doesn’t touch the cost to individual employers, who are being slapped with a huge regulatory burden in the midst of impending recession.
No presidential candidate has come out in favor of Schuler’s bill, most likely because the bill includes no avenue for undocumented workers who wish to become legal. Herein lies the ambitious stupidity of SAVE: If the bill works as intended, it will instantly turn the population of 12 million undocumented workers with no way of becoming legal into 12 million unemployed undocumented workers with no way of becoming legal. For a political constituency constantly worried about “anarchy,” this does not appear to be an ideal situation.
The SAVE Act may or may not come to a vote this session, but employment verification will almost certainly be a part of future compromise legislation on immigration reform. That’s worrying. Walls offend us aesthetically and symbolically; they’re clumsy and primitive and cruel. But they’re also easy to tear down; far easier than a slowly metastasizing system of total employment surveillance, of growing databases and expanding bureaucracies.
Our own Jim Harper has justifiably called the e-verify program Franz Kafka’s solution to illegal immigration. According to the Social Security Administration’s own estimates, almost 18 million Social Security records contain errors, many of them pertaining to US citizens. If even a small fraction of those problems find their way into the e-verify program, we’d be looking at millions of American citizens suddenly forced to “prove” to federal bureaucrats that they’re “eligible” to have a job. Giving the federal government the power to decide which US citizens are allowed to work for a living seems to me like a much bigger threat to our freedoms than anything illegal immigrants have done.
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