Drew Carey and our friends at Reason have produced a great 25 minute documentary about the Corey Maye case.

For additional background on the Maye case, go here.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a legal permanent resident who was arrested because he shared a common name with a suspected illegal immigrant. It illustrated how the E-Verify program would foul things for legal workers, a prominent subject of this paper.

Here’s another story of legal permanent resident mistreatment. This illustrates how overblown terror fears can cloud officials’ judgments and foul things for . . . well, everyone.

It seems that a woman in Florida asked her relatives in Monterrey, Mexico to ship her the birth certificates of two relatives who want to apply for their Mexican passports at the consulate in South Miami. At the behest of U.S. Customs and Border Security, the envelope is being held by the United Parcel Service in Louisville, Kentucky until she identifies herself further.

Asked to explain, a CBP spokeswoman in Washington asserted the U.S. government’s right to examine everything entering or exiting the country and said, “Identity documents are of concern to CBP because of their potential use by terrorists.”

This is a terrific example of poorly generated suspicion. In our paper on predictive data mining, Jeff Jonas and I wrote about how suspicion is properly generated in the absence of specific leads: “[T]here must be a pattern that fits terrorism planning . . . and the actions of investigated persons must fit that pattern while not fitting any common pattern of lawful behavior.”

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The Style section of today’s Washington Post features a terrific article about the National Security Archive, the nonprofit group dedicated to unearthing goverment secrets. The privately funded group, about 35 strong, uses the Freedom of Information Act to collect about 75,000 documents a year, which staffers analyze and then post on the website. The Archive’s greatest hits (see, e.g., here and here) demonstrate that as Patrick Henry put it, one should “never depend on so slender a protection as the possibility of being represented by virtuous men.” Don’t trust: verify.

One of my favorite documents on the site is the Operation Northwoods Memo, prepared by the Pentagon in the wake of the Bay of Pigs disaster:

titled “Justification for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba” [the memo] was provided by the JCS to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara on March 13, 1962, as the key component of Northwoods. Written in response to a request from the Chief of the Cuba Project, Col. Edward Lansdale, the Top Secret memorandum describes U.S. plans to covertly engineer various pretexts that would justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba. These proposals - part of a secret anti-Castro program known as Operation Mongoose - included staging the assassinations of Cubans living in the United States, developing a fake “Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington,” including “sink[ing] a boatload of Cuban refugees (real or simulated),” faking a Cuban airforce attack on a civilian jetliner, and concocting a “Remember the Maine” incident by blowing up a U.S. ship in Cuban waters and then blaming the incident on Cuban sabotage.

Sounds like tinfoil-hat stuff, I know, but thanks to FOIA and the National Security Archive, you can check for yourself [.pdf]. But if Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had had their way, you couldn’t. As top aides to Gerald Ford 34 years ago, they urged the president to veto amendments strengthening FOIA (he did, and Congress overrode his veto). The Archive has the documents on that too.

(cross-posted on genehealy.com)

Joining the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Association of Corporate Travel Executives has endorsed S. 717, the Identification Security Enhancement Act of 2007. This bill would reinstitute a negotiated rulemaking process regarding identity security that was established in the 9/11-Commission-inspired Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act.

A letter writer in the Washington Post complains about this Post editorial, which criticized the repression in Cuba, particularly the lack of freedom of expression and the right to emigrate. The writer declares,

Cuba is managing its economy and is making incremental changes and reforms within its socialist and human-needs-oriented system. The U.S. government and The Post shouldn’t lecture Cuba when we have our own problems with the economy, the budget, health care, infrastructure and our moral standing in the world.

I’ve just published a book, most of whose 300 pages are devoted to criticisms of the U.S. government on a far wider range of issues than that, so I’m no knee-jerk defender of any government, much less of the Bush administration. But let’s take a closer look at the writer’s claims:

Cuba is managing its economy…

Well, every country manages its economy in some sense. The Cuban government has managed to turn a beautiful country of tropical beaches 90 miles from North America into one of the poorest countries in the world.

…and is making incremental changes and reforms…

Yes, as the Post editorial noted:

In the past few weeks, Cuban President Raúl Castro has introduced a handful of micro-reforms to the oppressive and bankrupt regime left behind by his brother. Cubans are now officially allowed to buy cellphones, computers and microwave ovens; state workers may get deeds to apartments they have been renting for decades; and farmers may be able to sell part of what they grow at market prices. The measures won’t have much impact (though they have evidently annoyed the officially retired Fidel Castro): The vast majority of Cubans can’t afford to buy electronic goods, and the agricultural reforms fall short of steps taken years ago by North Korea.

So reforms are good. Wake me when they reform more than North Korea.

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Today, Cuba officially lifted its ban on the sale of computers to the general public. Some other prohibitions have also been scrapped in recent weeks: Cubans can now buy cell phones, stay in hotels previously reserved for tourists, and buy appliances like microwaves and TV sets.

Is this a sign of openness from Cuba’s geriatric regime? Not so.

A Cuban dissident I met in Havana last year sent me today an article he wrote about the real motive behind relaxing these bans. It has been reported in the state-controlled media that people purchasing these goods are later being investigated by the authorities who want to know the real sources of their income. As it’s widely known, the average Cuban salary is less than $20 a month, while the cost of most of these goods ranges in the hundreds of dollars. Many Cubans get their extra money from relatives in the United States, but many others run independent (and illicit) small businesses.

My friend tells the story of the first person to purchase an electric bicycle, which cost the equivalent of $1,070. This man had a small butter factory that apparently was very profitable, since he was selling the butter at a lower price than the government. After buying his electric bicycle, the authorities investigated him and discovered his factory. They proceeded to confiscate everything they found in his home, including the bike.

Let’s not forget that, after all, there is still a Castro brother running the show on the island. As my Cuban friend says about the so-called “reforms,” the fact that something is no longer prohibited doesn’t mean that you can do it.

Faced with the prospect of years in prison, Deborah Jeane Palfrey, known as the “D.C. Madam,” committed suicide on Thursday. Her pursuers and prosecutors should be ashamed of themselves.

Running a house of prostitution is not a distinction most of us would wish for our daughters. But it’s a vice, not a crime. That’s a crucial distinction in a free society. So far as we know, she never murdered, raped, assaulted, robbed, or defrauded anyone. Like any broker, she brought together willing buyers and willing sellers. And for doing so, she was convicted–not actually of prostitution but of “racketeering” and money laundering — and faced up to 55 years in prison, though prosecutors estimated that her sentence would likely be “only” four to six years.

Palfrey was indicted after a three-year joint investigation by the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Postal Service. Apparently they couldn’t catch her cheating on her taxes, but her employees mailed her cut of the proceeds in money orders, which led to racketeering and money laundering charges. As with former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, apparently a fishing expedition into money matters turned up something far more headline-worthy.

But really — a three-year investigation of a prostitution service? Are there no real criminals? Are there no terrorists? Before, during, and after 9/11, the Justice Department ran a 13-month investigation of a brothel in New Orleans. At least 10 FBI agents were involved. As Jonathan Turley noted, “Only the FBI could go to the French Quarter and find only a dozen prostitutes after a year of investigation. Given the roughly one-to-one ratio between agents and prostitutes, the FBI could have produced a hundred times this number by simply having agents walk down Bourbon Street.” What a ridiculous waste of money and manpower.

But the waste is not the worst aspect of this outrage. Even if there were no criminals and no terrorists to hunt down, it would be wrong to harass, arrest, prosecute, imprison — and hound to death — people who are violating no one’s rights.

There’s a nightmarish intersection of old prostitution laws and modern financial regulations. Palfrey was investigated on suspicion of tax evasion and then convicted of “racketeering” and “money laundering.” But she was no racketeer; she was one woman with some employees or contract workers. Spitzer’s bank accounts were being monitored, as apparently all our bank accounts are, under post-9/11 laws allegedly designed to turn up evidence of terrorist financing or other nefarious activity. And boy, did they find something sinister — a married man having sex with prostitutes.

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Last week, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) vetoed a transportation bill that included a provision objecting to the federal REAL ID Act. The bill would have required the federal government to pay 95 percent of the cost of issuing national IDs before Minnesota would participate. Claiming political machinations were afoot, Pawlenty said that he preferred “something more reasonable like 50 or 60 percent.” One wonders what principle of federalism, liberty, or privacy could possibly support his willingness to accept a 50% unfunded surveillance mandate.

A much clearer vision will be on display next week when Governor Mark Sanford (R-SC) joins Senator Jon Tester (D-MT) here at the Cato Institute to discuss the REAL ID Act. South Carolina has barred itself from participating in the national ID system created by the Act, and Governor Sanford defiantly refused to ask the Department of Homeland Security for an extension of the compliance deadline earlier this year.

Senator Tester represents a state that has been similarly defiant. He is an original cosponsor of legislation that would repeal the REAL ID Act and restore the identification security provisions of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Protection Act, which REAL ID repealed.

The event is called The REAL ID Rebellion: Whither the National ID Law?, next Wednesday, May 7th, at noon, and it will be Webcast.

Arizona’s law requiring employers to use the federal government’s “E-Verify” system to check workers’ immigration status has employers there “confused by the law’s requirements and ‘terrified’ at the prospect of losing their business licenses if they run afoul of its provisions,” according to a local chamber of commerce official.

My recent paper on electronic employment verification calls it “Franz Kafka’s solution to illegal immigration.”

Here’s a new bill in Congress that strikes me as a peculiar encroachment on freedom. H.R. 5912 would amend the U.S. code to make cigarettes and certain other tobacco products nonmailable. Undoubtedly, this would make it a teensy bit harder for some people to smoke and chew tobacco.

More importantly, I think, it would deepen the role of the Postal Service in surveillance and enshrine the USPS a part of our niggling nanny state.

Does this bill affect you directly? Chances are it doesn’t, as few people send or receive cigarettes in the mail. But what happens tomorrow when you’re part of a disfavored group?

The bill’s sponsor is Rep. John McHugh (R-NY) who today features on his homepage House passage of a bill to establish a thing called the Hudson-Fulton-Champlain Commemoration Commission.

I recently had the opportunity to conduct a pair of briefings for congressional staff regarding electronic employment eligibility verification. A pair of bills are vying for the attention of Congress these days. I suggested in my recent paper, “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration,” that Congress should ignore both. Indeed, it should eliminate “internal enforcement” of immigration law entirely.

One of my co-briefers provided staffers with some interesting information pertaining to the idea of building a regulatory contraption for automatic nationwide verification of workers’ identity and immigration status. He was a representative of SSA workers from the American Federation of Government Employees, National Council of SSA Field Operations Locals.

The programs slated to go national under these proposals would compare data about new workers (and in some cases, existing workers) with databases at the Social Security Administration and the Department of Homeland Security. When the data didn’t match, workers would receive what is called a “tentative nonconformation.” With the 4.1% error rate in SSA files (as found by its Inspector General), that’s a lot of tentative nonconfirmations going even to law-abiding American citizens. A higher percentage of the time, naturalized citizens would get them, too, as government data about them is even more error-prone. Bad government data is just one source of error.

Anyway, when a tentative nonconfirmation is issued, employers are supposed to communicate this to the employee (not all do) and the worker is supposed to report to a Social Security Administration office or the Department of Homeland Security to clear the problem up. This is where the interesting new information comes in.

What would the process be like? Well, try calling your local SSA field office to find out. The SSA worker rep reported that 50% of those calls aren’t answered because field offices are too busy. Calls to the SSA’s national 800-number don’t go through 25% of the time.

It’s not just a phone problem. The agency currently has a backlog of 752,000 on disability rulings. That’s three quarters of a million people who aren’t getting an answer from SSA. It takes 530 days – a little under a year and a half – to get a disability ruling out of SSA.

In my paper, I wrote about the experience American workers would get at the Social Security offices when they went to clear up their tentative nonconfirmations:

Disputes of tentative nonconfirmations would not happen in lushly carpeted offices with marble columns, hot coffee, and friendly, attentive staff. The experience of American workers when they sought permission to work would be much more like their trips to the nation’s departments of motor vehicles, post offices, and dentists—long lines, unfriendly service, and painful procedures.

The SSA union rep assures me that SSA workers are friendly. Any perception of unfriendliness is due to overwork. Fair enough; I may have been slapdash in my writing about SSA employees. But a national electronic employment eligibility verification system would result in 3.6 million new visits to these folks, overworking them and eroding their courtesy even more. These visits, and administering tentative nonconfirmations at SSA, would cost $1 billion, according to the union rep.

Of course, an SSA employee union rep would happily take the money and add workforce to do whatever Congress wants. My preference is to save the money. Enforcement of our abnormally restrictive immigration law causes us to spend taxpayer money on undermining the productive economy. That shouldn’t make sense to anyone.

George Will has another great column on threats to political speech in modern America. He reports the story of some people in Parker North, Colo., who didn’t want to be annexed to the larger town of Parker. When some residents proposed annexation, others

began trying to persuade the rest to oppose annexation. They printed lawn signs and fliers, started an online discussion group and canvassed neighbors, little knowing that they were provoking Colorado’s speech police.

One proponent of annexation sued them. This tactic — wielding campaign finance regulations to suppress opponents’ speech — is common in the America of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. The complaint did not just threaten the Parker Six for any “illegal activities.” It also said that anyone who had contacted them or received a lawn sign might be subjected to “investigation, scrutinization and sanctions for campaign finance violations.”

Quite a chilling effect on the speech of a few local residents. Fortunately, Will notes, the Parker Six (why not the Parker North Six? After all, Parker is what they don’t want to be part of. But who am I to question George Will?) are represented in their defense of their First Amendment rights by the Institute for Justice.

Meanwhile, in another section of the same Washington Post, a similar story is playing out in Virginia. A Democratic candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives began placing campaign signs in supporters’ yards a full year before the election. Botetourt County officials reminded people of a longstanding ordinance about how long political signs can be displayed. In this case it’s the ACLU of Virginia threatening to sue. But Botetourt (pronounced BAHT-uh-tott) officials are not deterred in their determination to protect law, order, and the Botetourt way:

“If we don’t have some semblance of order, we’d just have a libertarian society where anything goes,” said Jim Crosby, a longtime resident and former chairman of the Botetourt Republican Party.

Yep. First political signs in someone’s yard, then a bunch of competing churches, school choice, deregulation, women working outside the home, and pretty soon you’d have a libertarian society where anything goes.

The Supreme Court has rendered its decision in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board. This is the case challenging Indiana’s voter ID requirement.

Briefly, the plaintiffs in the case did not establish sufficient proof of the burden on voting that the ID requirement would have. This was a facial challenge to the statute, and there was no plaintiff who had actually been dissuaded or prevented from voting. Sayeth the court:

[O]n the basis of the record that has been made in this litigation, we cannot conclude that the statute imposes “excessively burdensome requirements” on any class of voters.

There was also no evidence that Indiana has ever been victimized by impersonation at the polling place, which a voter ID requirement would help thwart, but in a facial challenge to a law like this, courts will defer to the state’s interests in deterring and detecting voter fraud, and in safeguarding voter confidence.

Advocates of voter ID will interpret this as a ringing endorsement, but it’s an unsurprising result. Hopefully, they won’t pursue a national voter identification requirement. In a recent TechKnowledge column inspired by the case, “Voter ID: A Tempest in a Teapot that Could Burn Us All,” I wrote:

A national registration system for voting would quickly be repurposed and used for many other kinds of regulatory control. There is no shortage of proposals for national registration and control of citizens. Should the voter ID tempest in a teapot boil over, the tiny specter of voter fraud could thrust a mandatory national ID into the hands of law-abiding citizens.

The Constitution gives Congress power to regulate the elections that select its members and, to a lesser degree, the president. But Congress does not have to use that power to its fullest extent. States recognize their own interests in fair elections, and they should experiment among themselves with ways to secure elections while making sure the vote is available to all qualified people.

The Ugandan government has arrested Andrew Mwenda, a member of the 2008 International Selection Committee for the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty, along with his fellow journalists Odobo Bichachi and John Njoroge. Andrew Mwenda is a brave journalist who tells it like he sees it. He is well known for standing up for the rights of others; his involvement in the Milton Friedman Prize is only one element of his long commitment to human rights. It’s time that others stand up for his rights and those of Odobo Bichachi and Jhohn Njoroge. Cordial email letters to the Ugandan Embassy and the Ugandan government urging them to release the journalists and respect press freedom can make a difference:

His Excellency Professor Perezi K. Kamunanwire

Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
Fax: (202) 726 1727
pkamunanwire@ugandaembassyus.org

Mr. Charles Ssentongo
Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM)/ Minister Counselor
Fax: (202) 726 1727
Cssentongo@ugandaembassyus.org

Mr. Emmanuel Bwomono Olobo
First Secretary
Fax: (202) 726 1727
ebwomono-olobo@ugandaembassyus.org

Mr. Michael Karugaba
Second Secretary
Fax: (202) 726 1727
mkarugaba@ugandaembassyus.org

(In addition to being an outspoken advocate and practitioner of a free press, Andrew Mwenda is an outspoken proponent of development through the free market. Here is Andrew explaining the failures of “foreign aid.”)

Good column on the seizure of 400+ children from the FLDS ranch in Texas. (HT: Volokh).

As I said in this Cato podcast,  I think it is telling that no young adult or child has been found saying “Thank you so much for rescuing me!  It is nice to be in a place where I am not beaten up!”  The absence of proof is now considered evidence of massive “cult” brainwashing.  If a child says “I love my parents and want to go home,” it means he has been brainwashed by the “cult.”  And if a child says “I like my foster parents a lot.  They give me candy and the video games are awesome,” it means the child’s actual parents are unfit.

State authorities talk a lot about rape and forced marriages, but 300 children are ages 4 and below.  They should be sent home because there is no evidence of abuse.  All the boys should go home because there’s no evidence of abuse.  As for the remaining girls, they have been held for 3 weeks already … the judge should give the police one more week to present evidence or they should be going home too.   The investigation can continue, but 3+ weeks in custody is enough already.  

When it comes to separating children from the parents, the burden of proof must be borne by the state. 

Much as I hate to rain on my colleague Juan Carlos Hidalgo’s understandable happiness at the decriminalization of personal consumption/possession of small amounts of drugs, this doesn’t exactly represent a ray of hope in Argentina’s otherwise gloomy policy mix.  Not because I believe in the War on Drugs – I can’t imagine anybody at Cato does – but because it was a court that reached this decision instead of a policymaking body.

Imagine the outcry if the U.S. Supreme Court simply decreed a policy it didn’t like to be unconstitutional – I know, with Justices Stevens and Kennedy at the apogee of their powers, it’s not a far stretch.  Better yet, recall the poison the Court injected into our legal and political systems when it short-circuited the political process by inventing a right to abortion in Roe v. Wade (again, I’m not saying anything about the underlying policy arguments).

So it is here: Instead of having the Argentine Congress change the law, the nation’s Supreme Court (by a vote of 4-3) simply decreed that criminalizing drug use is unconstitutional.  Reports are still sketchy, but this sounds like precisely the kind of judicial fiat developing (or any) countries need to avoid if they want to strengthen the rule of law.

The National Conference of State Legislatures wants the REAL ID Act gone. It supports S. 717, the Identification Security Enhancement Act of 2007, which would repeal the REAL ID Act and reinstitute a negotiated rulemaking process on identity security that was established in the 9/11-Commission-inspired Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act.

It’s not a foregone conclusion that an organization like this would reject a behemoth of a project like building a national ID and surveillance system. The NCSL isn’t a small-government organization, and it could just as well have lobbied for billions of dollars in funding.

Are you an entrepreneur who deposits a regular amount of your business revenues in the bank? Watch out, the government might come after you for illegal “structuring.”

Are you a high earner who regularly pulls out a substantial amount of cash from your bank account? Watch out, your bank could be sending ”suspicious activity reports” about you to the government, as former senator Bob Dole’s bank did.

Have you ever deposited or withdrawn more than $10,000 from your bank? Watch out, because your activities were recorded on a government database of “currency transaction reports,” which is growing by 16 million new reports each year.

Did you overstate your income on a loan form when you bought your house? Watch out, the government could nail you for both ”bank fraud” and “money laundering.”

Forbes focuses on government encroachments on our civil liberties in a series of articles this month. See here, here and here

As a tax wonk, the IRS angle in these articles caught my eye. But like many people, I find it very disturbing that continual expansions in federal power are shrinking the realm of privacy and individual automony in modern society.  

Says WCCO.com:

Pawlenty has threatened to veto a major transportation bill because it includes language that would hamper Minnesota’s ability to comply with the [REAL ID Act].

Prepare for more of this if electronic employment eligibility verification goes national. Reports Dianne Solís of the Dallas Morning News:

Federal immigration agents executing arrest warrants for workers at the Pilgrim’s Pride poultry plant in Mount Pleasant arrested the wrong Jesus García at his home near the plant – despite his repeated assurances that he was a legal permanent resident.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents targeted workers at Pilgrim’s plants in Texas and four other states, and by Thursday, had arrested 311 workers on identity fraud charges or immigration violations.

. . .

“We think it is a case of mistaken identity,” said Fernando Dubove, Mr. García’s attorney. “It is the wrong Jesus García. It is really tough when you have a common name.”

This is probably just coincidence, but were an electronic employment eligibility verification system in place, illegal immigrants would affirmatively pursue this as a strategy, deepening the simple identity frauds they commit now to get ‘legal’ employment. They would acquire proof of identification as good or better than the true holder of a given identity.

In my recent paper, “Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration,” I discussed what would happen when mistaken identity/identity fraud situations arose in the EEV systems now being debated on Capitol Hill:

[L]aw-abiding citizens would regularly stand accused of identity fraud. The SSA and DHS would not know which user of a name-SSN pair was the genuine person and which was using a false identity. EEV would tentatively nonconfirm all users of that name-SSN pair. The “true” individuals attached to fraudulently used identities would learn of identity fraud in their names when they were refused work by EEV and plunged into a bureaucratic morass.

Luckily, these victims of the system would just be denied employment and not arrested - if that’s your idea of luck . . .

A “sensor” is a device that measures a physical quantity and converts it into a signal that can be read by an observer or instrument. Sensors that convert analog information into digital form are the most interesting. The information they collect is easy to store, transmit, and reuse.

Digital sensors are all around - the keyboard on your computer, your cell phone, the surveillance cameras in your office building, and so on.

Lots of good things come from having these sensors around, and the systems they attach to - that’s for sure. But they don’t always serve our interests. Let’s take a look at an example of digital sensing gone wrong.

A colleague of mine recently returned from a business trip, where he engaged in important and sober work. He arrived home late from his trip, and his patient and loving wife, already in bed, engaged him in some conversation. Fairly quickly, she asked him whether he had enjoyed himself at the strip bar (!). My hard-working and serious colleague was concerned. Why, on returning to the warm glow of his happy home-life, should he be asked this question?

As he tells it, he found himself short on cash one evening, and ducked into the nearest establishment looking for an ATM. The generous purveyors of this . . . nightclub - who could have known it was something more? - graciously allowed him entry for the few moments it took to get the cash and be on his way.

ATMs are digital sensors. They record usage information and tie it to other details, like location. This is known as “meta-data” - information about information, such as where and when a given piece of information was collected.

The ATM transmitted this data and meta-data back to my colleague’s bank and, through an online banking system, to his wife. The system identified the ATM as being at “Antics Topless Lounge” or something like that. You can understand the short string of inferences that his caring, truly lovely wife drew when presented with this single item of sensed data.

The reporting of ATM location information is a convenience to those who may have forgotten where they used the ATM, but it’s less welcome to someone whose sweet and lovely life-partner might draw unfortunate inferences from ATM use in certain locations. Sensors have social consequences, and they’re not all good.

So I was nonplussed by the cover of the latest issue of Government Technology magazine. It shows the front of a police car, photographed from a low angle to give it a pugnacious look. (Alas, I can’t find the image online.) The car is decked out with lights and sirens, of course, but also with sensors - on the roof and behind the windshield.

“FREEZE FRAME,” says the magazine cover, “License plate scanners extend the reach of local police.” Inside, an article describes how license plate scanning by U.S. police agencies is “the next big thing” for catching stolen cars and locating suspects. But the real benefit, according to the chief of detectives and commanding officer of the Detective Bureau at the Los Angeles Police Department, “comes from the long-term value of being able to track vehicles - where they’ve been and what they’ve been doing . . . .”

Make no mistake: there is value in that, just like there’s value in knowing where you used the ATM. But there’s risk in that, too. It’s not an unalloyed good to give people data about your comings and goings - other than your loving, caring family, of course.

Unlike my colleague and his saintly wife, it’s none of the police’s business where law-abiding citizens have been going and what they’ve been doing. When these sensors are used for mass surveillance and not just spotting bad guys, that crosses an important line.

This is not an argument against giving police these sensors. They will be a boon for law enforcement and an aid to our safety and security. But if the back-end systems put information about every vehicle’s location into a database for later use, that’s inappropriate surveillance of the law-abiding public. Unlike my colleague’s charming, gracious, and forgiving wife, the police shouldn’t be in a position to ask us whether we enjoyed ourselves at the strip bar.

The Virginia Supreme Court “reined in police searches yesterday, overturning convictions in two 2005 drug cases in which the court said police had conducted searches based on vague suspicions.” L. Steven Emmert, a Virginia lawyer-blogger, told the Washington Post he wasn’t surprised: “While Virginia is still one of the law-and-order states, the Supreme Court is very respective of Bill of Rights types of cases.”

I think “while” is the wrong conjunction in that sentence. Maybe it should be “Because Virginia is still one of the law-and-order states, the Supreme Court is very respective of Bill of Rights types of cases.”

“Law and order” is a phrase often used to imply “tough on crime” policies, perhaps suggesting harsh legal penalties harshly applied. Wikipedia notes, “The expression also sometimes carries the implication of arbitrary or unnecessary law enforcement, or excessive use of police powers.”

But law and order are necessary for the flourishing of human life. Advocates of liberty and limited government should not concede the concept of “law and order” to those who engage in “excessive use of police powers.” Those who actually believe in law and order would hold police and prosecutors, as well as criminal suspects, to the rule of law; and that seems to be what the Virginia Supreme Court did. So here’s to justices who understand that “law and order” and “the Bill of Rights” are allies, not enemies.

Responding to concerns over ultra-thin models in fashion magazines and advertisements, the French National Assembly has approved legislation that would make the promotion of extreme dieting a crime punishable by up to two years in jail.

France is not alone in its paternalist concern for young women lured into “unrealistic standards of beauty” by the fashion industry.

Spain has banned models with less than a specified body mass index. Last year, Italy barred girls under 16 from its runways and started requiring all models to present health certificates proving they do not suffer from eating disorders. New laws in Britain require models with anorexia or bulimia to prove they are being treated for the disorders before they can participate in London Fashion Week this September.

Some fashion editors objected to the bill. And there were a few opponents in the Assembly:

Most of the left-wing opposition deputies abstained on the vote, with some calling it repressive. “Criminalizing behaviour has no place in public health policy,” said Jacqueline Fraysse, a Communist Party lawmaker.

Vive la France, a country where the Communists denounce the un-libertarian policies of conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy, whose party voted unanimously for the bill.

I was pleased a couple of months ago to point out where presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) had distinguished himself and gotten it right on whether driver licensing should be linked to immigration status. The use of driver licensing for immigration enforcement is a major impetus behind the national ID system that our country should rightly avoid.

Such pleasures don’t last. The senator published an opinion piece in the Charlotte Observer this week calling for a “mandatory electronic system that enables employers to verify the legal status of their employees within days of hiring them.”

It is very hard to hold both positions. As I pointed out in my recent paper on electronic employment verification, it is nearly impossible to “strengthen” internal enforcement of immigration law through EEV without creating a national identification system:

[T]he things necessary to make a system like this really impervious to forgery and fraud would convert it from an identity system into a cradle-to-grave biometric tracking system. Almost no way exists to do national EEV that is not a step down that road.

Perhaps Senator Obama would implement an EEV system with a federally issued national ID card rather than the driver licensing system. (That’s not a good option either.) Perhaps he’s devised a credentialing system that allows people to prove eligibility to work under current immigration law without a national ID. (Such things are possible.) Most likely, the senator has expressed two pretty much irreconcilable positions.

I’ve read through most of the John Yoo torture memo released last week (Part 1, Part 2 [.pdfs]). As I’d gathered from the news reports, there’s not much new here: the core of the argument has been known since at least 2004, with the release of the infamous August 1, 2002 torture memo, also drafted by Yoo. At the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel from 2001 to 2003, Yoo was the key figure in advising the executive branch as to the limits–if any–to its powers. As Georgetown’s David Cole has put it, Yoo “was the right person in the right place at the right time…. Here was someone who had made his career developing arguments for unchecked power, who could cut-and-paste from his law review articles into memos that essentially told the president, ‘You can do what you want.’”

In the memo released last week, once again we see a breathtakingly narrow interpretation of what constitutes torture under US law. To rise to the level of torture, the abuse must, Yoo argues, inflict pain equivalent to that associated with “death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions.” Presumably, the rack qualifies under that definition, but hey, what about the thumbscrew?

Such questions ultimately don’t matter much under Yoo’s analysis, because, in his view, Congress lacks the constitutional power to prevent the president from ordering torture: “Any effort by Congress to regulate the interrogation of enemy combatants would violate the Constitution’s sole vesting of the Commander-in-Chief authority in the President.” As Yoo sees it, telling the executive branch not to abuse prisoners is like telling the CINC what weapons can be used to take a hill occupied by the enemy: “Congress can no more interfere with the President’s conduct of the interrogation of enemy combatants than it can dictate strategic or tactical decisions on the battlefield.”

One of the problems Tim Lynch and I experienced talking about our 2006 paper on the administration’s constitutional theories is that when you describe the implications of those theories in calm, sober tones, people tend to think you’re being strident and hysterical. Luckily John Yoo is willing to serve as his own reductio ad absurdum. If you don’t have the time for an 81-page memo, try this short, cringe-inducing YouTube clip:

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A friend and supporter of my work on REAL ID sent me a link to this WebMemo from the Heritage Foundation, entitled “All Aboard: Fifty States Now Compliant with Real ID.” I’m using the subject line of his email as the title of this post.

There certainly seems to be confusion in some quarters about REAL ID’s current status. Let’s take a brief look at how states stand in terms of compliance.

Because not a single state will comply with REAL ID on the statutory deadline, May 11th, the Department of Homeland Security has been giving out deadline extensions willy-nilly the last few months. It gave extensions just for the asking to states that have statutorily barred themselves from complying, for example.

Some states refused to even ask for extensions. When this happened, DHS quickly switched to issuing states extensions if the states were independently changing their driver’s licensing processes in ways that would meet any of the requirements of REAL ID. States like Montana and New Hampshire wrote to DHS expressing no intention to comply with the law, but stating what they had done on their own. These DHS interpreted as requests for extensions, and granted them.

When the governor of Maine last week finally sent DHS a letter stating his intention to submit legislation relating to REAL ID compliance, the DHS took that as a request for an extension and granted it. The Maine legislature will have to consider any such bills, of course. Maine’s is the legislature that was the first in the country to reject REAL ID.

Getting deadline extensions by hook and by crook out to all 50 states is a pretty long way from getting all 50 states to comply. The actual state of things is reflected well on this map, maintained at the ACLU-run Web site RealNightmare.org. It shows seven states still self-barred from complying, and many others protesting the law. An eighth - Idaho - recently saw legislation barring compliance with REAL ID move through the Senate and to the governor’s desk.