Author Archive
Sending Up Security
People are highly tuned risk managers. Daily, we make decision about risky things like crossing streets. To do so, we analyze the speed and density of traffic, light conditions, our own physical skills, and myriad other factors to determine whether to cross in the middle of a block or at a controlled intersection.
Five years since 9/11, people are getting better at assessing the risks of terrorist acts. And people are growing increasingly skeptical of the risk choices being made for them by the Department of Homeland Security. The evidence? Their willingness to see security lampooned.
The writers at The Onion are undoubtedly finding a good reception for this send-up of the Transportation Security Administration’s liquids rules.
And people are diverting themselves from their exasperation with airport security using this fun game.
A basic indictment of government-provided security is in daily newspapers’ comic sections this morning. Syndicated cartoon Bizarro by Dan Piraro is titled “Orientation Seminar at Homeland Security.” It depicts a teacher at a chalkboard that says “Inconvenience = Security.” (Available online here early next month).
The funny bone is a highly tuned instrument, and it’s showing the dissonance in air security today.
Baltimore Sun: Deep-Six REAL ID
The Baltimore Sun opinion page recognizes that the REAL ID Act’s national ID system “will neither weed out terrorists nor make a dent in the flow of illegal immigration – the two problems it was devised to address.” In light of the exorbitant cost and impossibility to implement, its advice is to junk the REAL ID Act.
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.
Next Up: CNN Exposes Terrorism Hype!
Jon Stewart lampoons CNN for its over-the-top “TARGET: USA” coverage.
The media has a significant role in fomenting excessive fear of terrorism and engendering disproportionate responses.
Cato Unbound – Migrating Toward National ID?
The current Cato Unbound, Mexicans in America, is the usual provocative and wide-ranging fare. There’s no lack of issues – or passion – in the debate about immigration.
One item in the current discussion that piques my interest – indeed, concerns me - is the formative consensus that “internal enforcement” of the immigration laws is a good idea.
University of Texas at Austin economics professor Stephen Trejo writes:
Given that most illegal immigrants come to the United States to work, why don’t we get serious about workplace enforcement? Retail stores are able to verify in a matter of seconds consumer credit cards used to make purchases. Why couldn’t a similar system be put in place to verify the Social Security numbers of employees before they are hired? . . . I suspect that we could do much more to control illegal immigration by directing technology and other enforcement resources toward the workplace rather than toward our porous southern border.
Doug Massey, co-director of the Mexican Migration Project at the Office of Population Research, Princeton University, has interesting information and ideas for reform to which he would adjoin ”a simple employment verification program required of all employers to confirm the right to work.”
It does sound simple – until you step back and realize that the simple idea they’re talking about is giving the federal government the power to approve or reject every Americans’ job application. Does anyone think that this power, once adopted – and the technology put in place to administer it - will be limited to immigration law enforcement?
To do this, all people - not just immigrants, all people - would have to be able to prove their identity to federal standards, likely using some kind of bullet-proof identity document (even more secure than current law requires). That will soon be in place thanks to the REAL ID Act. Once we’re all carrying a bullet-proof identity document, do you think that its use will be limited to proof of identity for new employees?
It’s easy to see how facile acceptance of internal immigration law enforcement adds weight to arguments for expanded government control and tracking of all citizens. There are plenty of reasons to be concerned with internal enforcement, and the national ID almost certainly required to make that possible. Many of them are discussed in my book, Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood.
Fighting Terror With Anti-Terror
Security guru Bruce Schneier has a grasp of how to defeat terrorism.
Privacy Debacle Top Ten
Wired News reporter Annalee Newitz has compiled a “top ten” list of privacy debacles.
It’s easy to quibble with the results, but I was delighted to see “The Creation of the Social Security Number” at #1. Our national identifier has used its government backing to push aside all others and enable government and corporate surveillance on a scale that would never have occurred under natural conditions.
In Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood, I discuss how the uniform identification system we’ve built around the Social Security Number is insecure for individuals, making information about them too readily available to governments, corporations, and crooks.
The fix is nothing so ham-handed as banning uses of Social Security Numbers. Rather, it will be necessary to remake our identification systems so that they are diverse and competitive, and thus solicitous of individuals’ interests.
Watching the “Lack of Competition” Meme
Ars Technica — a wonderful publication with brief, informative, and interesting pieces on technology — is showing a little sloppliness in covering the broadband competition issue. The question whether there is sufficient competition in the provision of broadband Internet service underlies the debate about “net neutrality” — whether there should be public utility regulation of broadband.
Discussing FTC chair Deborah Majoras’ speech at the PFF Aspen Summit, an Ars reporter casually observes, “[M]arket forces really do not exist when it comes to broadband.” That’s at least overstatement. A little more caution would be good given the centrality of the issue.
To show the existence of a duopoly (which is not inherently a competition-free situation), the report links to an earlier Ars piece interpreting a study as showing “not much” competition between DSL and cable. But that conclusion goes only to price competition. And it’s a little overstated, too.
The actual study, from a group called Kagan Research, seems to show that DSL is the low-cost option (and getting lower), while cable is the high-bandwidth option (getting higher in bandwidth while dropping in cost more slowly). That diminishes head-to-head price(-only) competition because each is focused on a different niche. But they’re still in competition.
Data Mining or the Fourth Amendment?
Boalt Hall Law Professor and Visiting AEI Scholar John Yoo writes in a short piece on the AEI website that we should consider using data mining to pursue terrorists. He makes at least two errors: one historical and one statistical.
Discussing the recent vogue for making U.S. law more like Britain’s, Yoo writes:
[I]ncreasing detention time or making warrants easier to come by merely extends an old-fashioned approach to catching terrorists. These tools require individualized suspicion and “probable cause”; police must have evidence of criminal activity in hand. Such methods did not prevent 9/11, and stopping terrorists, who may have no criminal record, requires something more.
It’s hard to put aside that the vogue for making U.S. law more like Britain’s would undo part of what the Revolutionary War was fought for. And Yoo’s placement of the phrase “probable cause” in quotes — I hope that’s not to suggest that the language of the Fourth Amendment is quaint.
But putting all that aside, Yoo’s first error has to do with more-recent history. He argues that traditional investigative methods “did not prevent 9/11.” But traditional investigative methods weren’t applied to the problem.
Spoke Too Soon
Last week in this space, I lamented a couple of the routine, tiny steps that carry us further down the path to bigger and more intrusive government.
By giving state food stamp programs greater access to personal information about Americans, Congress had masked the cost of rescuing Americans from Lebanon. The result was a bill that expanded the federal role in international rescue while spreading personal information about us a little further.
This weekend I discovered the rest of the story. In a separate bill, Congress made available yet more funds for rescuing Americans from Lebanon. Additional cost, 17 cents per U.S. family.
As Tom Palmer pointed out, Lebanon has been a dangerous place as a matter of common sense and announced U.S. policy for quite some time. I suspect that he, like I do, wants Americans to travel far and wide, experience the world, and make friends. But it’s not the federal government’s responsibility to subsidize that process by rescuing Americans when they encounter danger. Americans who need rescue should foot the bill.
Every Day in Every Way . . .
Big-ticket items drive most discussions of politics and government, but let’s not forget to lament the small advances that help make big government what it is.
At the outbreak of hostilities in southern Lebanon, my well-traveled colleague Tom Palmer expressed dismay that Americans overseas should expect a lift home courtesy of the U.S. government when they’ve gotten in harm’s way. Alas, by the end of July, Congress passed the Returned Americans Protection Act of 2006, which raised by $5 million the fiscal year 2006 limit on emergency assistance funds provided to U.S. citizens returning from foreign countries. Score one for bigger government — and for less responsible people.
But the bill actually results in reduced spending, saving about three cents (net present value) per U.S. family. How could this be?
A little legislative artifice did the trick. You see, the bill also allowed state food stamp agencies access to the National Directory of New Hires. They can use this database to verify employment and wage information for food stamp recipients using information on every newly hired American worker’s employment, wages, and receipt of unemployment insurance. With access to these data, state food stamp agencies will be able to better verify the income of their beneficiaries and reduce overpayments.
Wireless Progress — and the Challenge Not Yet Met
A lot is happening in the world of wireless telecommunications these days. And a lot is not. First, let’s look at a couple things that are happening:
WiMax is poised to move forward as a significant new platform for broadband. ”WiMax” is the popular name for the 802.16 wireless metropolitan-area network standard. It’s like WiFi but can travel a lot farther. It easily traverses the “last mile,” the complicated and expensive rights-of-way that create a high barrier to entry for competitors to DSL and cable.
Recently, Intel announced that a line of its chips will support WiMax. Intel also invested $600 million in leading WiMax provider Clearwire. Clearwire recently pulled back from an IPO, though, fueling speculation that Clearwire and WiMax are not all they’re cracked up to be. Since then, Sprint Nextel has announced that it would spend up to $3 billion to build a WiMax network. Nothing is certain, but WiMax looks pretty good right now for bringing more competition to broadband.
Here’s another thing happening: The Federal Communications Commission is amidst an auction of wireless spectrum. In 1993, Congress gave the FCC the authority to use competitive bidding for allocating rights to use radio spectrum. This beats comparative hearings and lotteries by a mile, because companies that have paid good money for spectrum tend to be well focused on making good use of it. This redounds to the benefit of consumers and the public through new, competitive wireless services.
Cato on Facebook
Cato on Twitter
Cato on Google+
Cato on YouTube
