Archive for the ‘Telecom, Internet & Information Policy’ Category

Balko: Three for TSA

Posted by Jim Harper

Radley Balko has nominated me to head the Transportation Security Agency. It’s a kind compliment. His column this week has some good ideas in it, too.

Fellow nominee Bruce Schneier doesn’t want the job. Of Bruce’s refusal, Radley says:

[I]t sorta’ reminds me of what a retired police chief once told me about how he staffed his SWAT team. He said he’d ask for volunteers, then disqualify every officer who raised his hand. He added, “The guys who want the job are the last ones who should have it.”

That leaves John Mueller, whose excellent 2004 Regulation magazine article “A False Sense of Insecurity?” has stood the test of time. His insight into the strategic logic of terrorism will eventually turn around our country’s maladjusted approach to securing against terrorism.

John Samples on Free Political Speech in 2009

Posted by Cato Editors

Is Cato Asleep at the Switch on Copyrights and Patents?

Posted by Timothy B. Lee

In today’s installment of Cato Unbound, Dean Baker calls libertarians to task for their failure to take a more skeptical stance toward the government-granted monopolies we call copyright and patent protections:

Their enforcement efforts have required terrorizing people for making unauthorized copies of copyrighted material. In a recent case, a single mother was fined several hundred thousand dollars for allowing her computer to be used to download 24 songs over the web. The entertainment industry has gotten the government to prohibit the production of electronic devices because they had inadequate protection against duplicating copyrighted material. They had a Russian computer scientist arrested when he visited the United States because he gave an academic lecture that explained how an encryption lock could be broken. They even went after the Girl Scouts for singing copyrighted songs without permission.

The extraordinary abuses that we see every day as a result of patent protection for prescription drugs and copyright protection should be sending libertarians through the roof, and perhaps it does. But, where are the libertarians’ research programs on alternatives to patents for financing drug research or alternatives to copyrights for financing creative and artistic work?

My area of expertise is information technology policy, so I haven’t written much about pharmaceutical patents, but as a Cato scholar I’ve certainly spilled plenty of ink criticizing the excesses of copyright and patent law as it applies to information technology. Here is the study I did in 2006 criticizing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which was responsible for putting that Russian computer scientist in jail. Here is an op-ed I wrote for the New York Times last year pointing out that software patents have become an impediment to innovation in the software industry. Here is an article I wrote this summer for Reason magazine pointing out the problems the DMCA is creating for music consumers. And I’ve done dozens of posts at the Technology Liberation Front criticizing the recent expansion of copyright and patent restrictions. For example, in 2006 I did about 20 posts examining various software patents and pointing out how they were impeding progress in the software industry.

Moreover, we’ve written extensively about methods for producing creative works without copyright protection. These include free software, selling advertising, catering to core fans, selling security, and selling services. Cato published an excellent study in 2006 about the rise of “amateur-to-amateur” culture, which largely thrives outside the constraints of copyright. The growth of these alternative approaches to content creation suggests that in the future, copyright is likely to be less, rather than more, important than it was in the 20th Century.

Read the rest of this post »

Diseconomies of Scale vs. Network Effects

Posted by Timothy B. Lee

I was very interested to read Roderick Long’s opening essay for this month’s Cato Unbound. Long draws a distinction between genuine free markets and policies such as corporate welfare and protectionism that favor the interests of incumbent businesses at the expense of the general public. Almost all libertarians draw this distinction, of course, but Long suggests that many libertarians too readily classify as “free market” policies that are more properly regarded as corporate welfare.

What caught my eye about Long’s article was his claim that in a genuinely free market, businesses would be significantly smaller than they are today. He points out that large, hierarchical businesses are subject to many of the same inefficiencies that plague government bureaucracies. The executives of the largest corporations cannot possibly have enough knowledge to make good decisions about the thousands of different projects various parts of their companies are undertaking, and so it’s inevitable that large companies will suffer from inefficiencies greater than those that afflict smaller firms.

I think this is an important point, and indeed is a theme that runs through my own work. For example, one of the key arguments of my Policy Analysis on network neutrality, which Cato released on Wednesday, is that the Internet’s success depends on the fact that it isn’t owned or managed by any single entity. Back in the 1990s, when the Internet was competing with proprietary online services like AOL and Compuserve, the Internet’s lack of centralized control turned out to be its most important strength. The hierarchical decision-making processes of the AOL and Compuserve companies simply couldn’t keep up with the spontaneous order of millions of Internet users acting without central direction.

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Tim Lee on “the Durable Internet”

Posted by Jim Harper

Tim Lee released an excellent new Policy Analysis today. The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation is a must-read for people on both sides of the debate over network neutrality regulation.

What I like best about this paper is how Tim avoids joining one “team” or another. He evenly gives each side its due - each side is right about some things, after all - and calls out the specific instances where he thinks each is wrong.

Lay readers may be challenged by some of the concepts in the paper, but there’s no time like the present to familiarize oneself with the basic infrastructure of our future economy and society.

Tim makes the case for treating the “end-to-end principle” as an important part of the Internet’s fundamental design. Tim disagrees with the people who argue for a network with “smarter” innards and believes that neutrality advocates seek the best engineering for the network. But they are wrong to believe that the network is fragile or susceptible to control. The Internet’s end-to-end architecture is durable, despite examples where it is not an absolute.

Tim has history lessons for those who believe that regulatory control of network management will have salutary effects. Time and time again, regulatory agencies have fallen into service of the industries they regulate.

“In 1970,” Tim tells us, “a report released by a Ralph Nader group described the [Interstate Commerce Commission] as ‘primarily a forum at which transportation interests divide up the national transportation market.’” Such is the likely fate of the Internet if its management were given to regulators at the FCC and their lobbyist friends at Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, and so on.

This paper has something for everyone, and will be a reference work as the network neutrality discussion continues. Highly recommended: The Durable Internet: Preserving Network Neutrality without Regulation.

Border Biometrics: “Zero Benefit?”

Posted by Jim Harper

ZDnet ran a story last week citing how security guru Bruce Schneier slams the US-VISIT program, which collects biometrics from people entering the country, saying that it has “zero benefit.”

I respect and like Bruce — he will be a participant in a major counterterrorism strategy conference we are having at Cato in January — but I have to voice my disagreement with him on this score. My belief is that border biometrics have an extremely small benefit — a benefit that rounds to zero, and one that is more than canceled out by the costs. But not zero.

As of 2006, US-VISIT had cost about $15 billion and was responsible for the apprehension of about 1,000 criminals.

“Take that $15 billion number,” wrote Schneier in a 2006 blog post. “One thousand bad guys, most of them not very bad, caught through US-Visit. That’s $15 million per bad guy caught. Surely there’s a more cost-effective way to catch bad guys?”

He’s right, but that’s an illustration of the costs overshadowing the benefits, not zero benefit. (Net benefits are actually negative. We’d be better off letting those 1,000 criminals remain free to do their hundreds of thousands  of dollars in damage, or using conventional law enforcement methods against them, than spending $15 million each to catch them.)

Read the rest of this post »

More Debunking of DHS E-Verify Claims - and the Bureaucrats that Make Them

Posted by Jim Harper

In past months, I spent a good deal of time debunking advocacy for E-Verify from the Department of Homeland Security.

The National Immigration Law Center has been in the fray for quite a while, too - they have a wealth of materials online - and recently added to it with a short, sweet primer on what it takes to comply with E-Verify: more than DHS wants to believe, that’s for sure.

That’s typical of bureaucrats, by the way. They study their programs all day every day - unaware of the challenges and priorities of real businesspeople - and come away finding it impossible to believe that someone could find their product complex.

Well, guess what? When your job is running a plumbing business, a grocery store, a restaurant, or a manufacturing plant, you don’t have all day every day to figure out your compliance issues. They’re burdens that destroy productivity.

E-Verify has been offered up as a panacea for immigration problems, but the cure is worse than the disease. I wrote at length about the regulatory burdens, complexities, and principled reasons to oppose electronic employment verification on principle in a paper called “Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.”

I had a friendly chat with Stewart Baker, the foil in many of my “debunking” posts linked above, the other night. Affable as ever, he reported unawareness of my writings on this blog. If true, this illustrates another problem with bureaucracy: Decision-makers are insulated to the point of ignorance. Privacy advocates “can’t and won’t tell you precisely how [things like] REAL ID [and E-Verify] threaten[] privacy” if you’re not paying attention.

Macho Sauce Gives Cannon a Run for His Money

Posted by Jim Harper

Here’s an interesting video in which the economics of health care are described in slightly more vernacular language than my colleague Michael Cannon would typically use. I venture to say that the presenter makes the eminently capable Mr. Cannon look quite staid.

This is a conservative, of course, and not a libertarian. Much of what comes after the first two minutes is off the mark in my opinion. But it’s good entertainment and it carries some good messages about how socialized medicine is a policy that’s best regarded as somewhat infelicitous.

FTC to Examine Intellectual Property Dec. 5; Cato to Examine Intellectual Property Monday

Posted by Jim Harper

The Federal Trade Commission has announced that it will hold “a series of public hearings beginning on December 5, 2008, in Washington, D.C., to explore the evolving market for intellectual property (IP).”

It’s timely, then, that we will be having a forum Monday on a provocative book whose thesis is the title: Against Intellectual Monopoly. Co-author Michele Boldrin will present the book, and Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation will critique it.

Highlighting one of the issues at Monday’s forum, the Arts+Labs blog points to Atkinson’s testimony about the value of American intellectual property on the export market. Over 50 percent of U.S. exports depend on some form of IP protection, according to Rob Atkinson.

It’ll be a good, interesting discussion. Register here now.

More Unwelcome Big-Think from Donald Kerr

Posted by Jim Harper

Donald Kerr, principal deputy director of national intelligence, created a stir last year when he opined about “privacy” in a way that redefined the concept as congenially to the intelligence community as possible.

I put it this way in a critique at the time:

“If you’ve identified yourself to your ISP,” he appears to think, “you’ve identified yourself to me.” The folks in his world may think that way, but that’s not the way the rest of us look at it, and it’s not consistent with a sound interpretation of the Fourth Amendment or life in a free society.

Now he’s back at it with “cybersecurity.”

Walter Pincus of the Washington Post reports on two recent Kerr speeches that have “called for a radical new relationship between government and the private sector” in this area:

One approach would have the government take equity stakes in companies developing technical products, in effect expanding the practice of In-Q-Tel, the CIA entity that invests in companies.

Another proposal is to provide the same protective capabilities applied to government Web sites, ending in .gov and .mil, to the private industry’s sites, ending in .com, which Kerr said have close to 98 percent of the nation’s most important information.
* * *
“We have a responsibility . . . to help those companies that we take an equity stake in or those that are just out there in the U.S. economy, to protect the most valuable assets they have, their ideas and the people who create them,” he said.

The government-ownership-of-private-assets train is rolling out of the station and Kerr wants his agency to be on board. But he’s wrong. It’s the responsibility of private owners to secure their assets.

This is big-think we do not need. Just like with his contortion of “privacy,” Kerr would upend the roles and responsibilities of government and the private sector by giving government an ownership stake, for “cybersecurity” reasons or any other.

A Breezy Slide From Vote Integrity to National ID

Posted by Jim Harper

Writing at Slate, Richard Hasen makes the case for nationalizing voter registration.

Yglesias approves (as does Drum at Mother Jones) and he ultimately concludes - though “nobody’s supposed to say this” - that “implementing a National ID Card system would help solve a lot of problems at what looks to me to be an extremely low cost in civil liberties.”

Tell that to the dead in Rwanda. It never occurred to the Belgian government that the identity card system they put in place there would be used to administer genocide 60 years later, but it was.

Bruce Schneier calls it “bad civic hygiene” to build a technology infrastructure that can be used to facilitate a police state. That’s what a national ID system is.

It’s easy to arrive at facile conclusions about national IDs if you don’t think it all the way through. Joseph Eaton published a book in 1986 called Card Carrying Americans that did just that (and didn’t, as to the thinking through). My write-up of it in 2005 called it “full of ‘would’s and ‘could’s - an exercise in imagination with few tethers to real-world practicalities.”

Same with Hasen’s article:

The federal government could assign each person a unique voter-identification number, which would remain the same regardless of where the voter moves. The unique ID would prevent people from voting in two jurisdictions, such as snowbirds who might be tempted to vote in Florida and New York.

Except that it doesn’t work that way. Simply giving people a unique identifier gets you the Social Security number. To prevent people voting in multiple jurisdictions, you don’t give, you take - take a biometric identifier, database it, and use it at every polling place (leaving the door still wide open to absentee ballot fraud).

Voting issues can’t be solved consistent with our national values quite so glibly. If it were easy, it would already have been done. Thoughtful people should resist, not indulge, the temptation to stab at voting concerns with a national ID.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see a national voter registration system converted to lots of purposes that aren’t as congenial as regularizing voter registration. Citing the fate of Rwandans was overly dramatic, of course. It’s only the most recent example among apartheid South Africa, Stalinist Russia, and Nazi-occupied Europe, none of which can happen here . . . .

What we could expect in the near term would be more and more thorough data collection, tighter and tighter government monitoring of commerce, work, housing, health care, education, and communications - for illegal immigration control, at first. But new uses would accrue with each shift in public urgency.

The most concerning of what Hasen has to say is this:

There’s something in this for both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats talk about wanting to expand the franchise, and there’s no better way to do it than the way most mature democracies do it: by having the government register voters. For Republicans serious about ballot integrity, this should be a winner as well. No more ACORN registration drives, and no more concerns about Democratic secretaries of state not aggressively matching voters enough to motor vehicle databases.

It’s deeply concerning, the prospect of the major political parties uniting against the people to “mature” our democracy and give us a national ID.

Government Data Mining: The Need for a Legal Framework

Posted by Jim Harper

Indiana University law professor Fred Cate writes with characteristic thoroughness and organization in his article “Government Data Mining: The Need for a Legal Framework,” published in the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review this summer.

Here’s a snippet from the abstract:

The article describes the extraordinary volume and variety of personal data to which the government has routine access, directly and through industry, and examines the absence of any meaningful limits on that access. So-called privacy statutes are often so outdated and inadequate that they fail to limit the government’s access to our most personal data, or they have been amended in the post-9/11 world to reduce those limits. And the Fourth Amendment, the primary constitutional guarantee of individual privacy, has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to not apply to routine data collection, accessing data from third parties, or sharing data, even if illegally gathered.

Professor Cate spends a good deal of time on the Supreme Court’s pernicious “third party doctrine,” which exempts information shared with a third party (think of ISPs, banks, etc.) from Fourth Amendment protection. This rule was bad when it was written and it grows worse and worse as we move our lives further and further online.

Oh, there are details from the paper I would have treated differently. He mistakenly says the 9/11 terrorists used false ID. (Fraudulently gotten, yes. False identities, no.) And he omits the Federal Agency Data Mining Reporting Act of 2007, passed as §804 of the Implementing Recommendations of the 9/11 Commission Act of 2007 (Public Law 110-53). But these are trivial issues with a paper that is excellent overall.

(I note with pride and pleasure that he cites the Cato Policy Analysis “Effective Counterterrorism and the Limited Role of Predictive Data Mining,” which Jeff Jonas and I wrote.)

Poking around among the Internets to confirm this and that detail, I found this post saying that Professor Cate authored much of a recent report called “Protecting Individual Privacy in the Struggle Against Terrorists.” It’s also very good stuff.

Fred Cate is doing good work.

Against Intellectual Monopoly Forum - Nov. 10

Posted by Jim Harper

It is commonly believed that intellectual property law in the form of copyright and patent is necessary for innovation and the creation of ideas and inventions such as machines, drugs, computer software, books, music, literature and movies.

But Michele Boldrin and his coauthor David K. Levine argue that intellectual property laws are costly and dangerous government grants of private monopoly over ideas. Their book Against Intellectual Monopoly seeks to show through theory and example that these legal regimes are not necessary for innovation and are damaging to growth, prosperity, and liberty.

The argument that intellectual property laws actually retard progress is a fascinating challenge to conventional beliefs about their foundations and utility. At the onset of the Information Age, the role of copyright, patent, and other legal regimes in the progress of science and arts is centrally important.

Join us Monday, November 10th for an interesting discussion of the book with coauthor Michele Boldrin, featuring commentary from Robert Atkinson, Founder and president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

Register here.

Ten Years of the DMCA, and Little to Cheer about

Posted by Timothy B. Lee

This week is the tenth anniversary of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which Bill Clinton signed into law on October 28, 1998. I was on last Friday’s Cato Daily Podcast discussing the DMCA’s detrimental effects on high tech innovation, and I’ve got a post at the Freedom to Tinker blog discussing one likely casualty of the DMCA, digital juke box software:

What we’re seeing in the video market is what the digital audio marketplace would have looked like if the recording industry had won its lawsuit against the first MP3 players. The recording industry lost that lawsuit, and entrepreneurs went on to build products that were much better than the “official” ones being pushed by the labels. Unfortunately, entrepreneurs in the digital video market don’t have that same option.

If the DMCA were not on the books, it seems likely that many of us would have set-top boxes with 500 GB hard drives capable of ripping dozens of DVDs to an open, standard format for subsequent streaming to any display in the user’s house. The existence of those boxes would spur the creation of a wider market for other digital video products designed to interoperate with the emerging open video standard.

Unfortunately, that’s not how things have gone. Hollywood has managed to do what the recording industry was unable to do: to ban users from converting their legally-purchased content to open formats. As a result, the market for open digital video devices is a pale shadow of what it would be in a competitive market. We’re stuck with clunky, proprietary, and non-interoperable products like Apple TV that require users to re-purchase their existing movie collections in order to watch them on the new device. I think everyone would agree that it was a good thing that the courts didn’t let the recording industry shut down the MP3 player market a decade ago. So why do we tolerate a law that effectively shuts down the analogous market for DVD jukeboxes?

David Friedman at Cato

Posted by David Boaz

David Friedman will talk about his new book, Future Imperfect: Technology and Freedom in an Uncertain World, at a Cato Book Forum next Thursday, November 6.

Speaking at Google and to the San Francisco Chronicle, he describes his thinking this way:

“There are no brakes available. … If it can be done, it will be done,” he said at an event that was recorded and posted on YouTube. “So the interesting thing to me is not what should you stop but how do you adapt.” …

“I’ve got three different technologies that could wipe out the species,” said Friedman, a self-professed libertarian who is certain that neither politics nor central planning will avert a possible bad technological outcome.

“I am much more worried about the government making the wrong response and doing damage than I am about the government not protecting me,” said Friedman, adding: “It’s a mistake to think of the world as if there was somebody in charge. There’s never been anybody in charge.”

David Friedman has been one of the most interesting libertarian thinkers for more than 30 years, since he published his book The Machinery of Freedom. Don’t miss his take on the future of technology and freedom. Sign up here.

“Secure” Government Databases?

Posted by Jim Harper

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.

Twitter Terror — Laughable? Or Is There a Lesson?

Posted by Jim Harper

I was amused to read that a draft Army intelligence report identified micro-blogging service Twitter as a potential tool for terrorists. On the other hand, it’s regrettable that this terrorism mania persists to foster this kind of report and media attention. There’s no distinct terror threat from Twitter.

If you’re reading this, you’re familiar with blogs. On Twitter you can publish ever-so-brief thoughts, giving your readers (or “followers”) ambient awareness of what’s on your mind or what you’re doing. Here’s an example: the Cato Institute’s Twitter feed, which I encourage you to follow. WashingtonWatch.com has one too. And CNN. And former Cato intern Felix Ling.

Now, to use of Twitter by terrorists: Sure, it’s possible, just like it’s possible with any communications medium. Twitter is right up there with telephones, pen and paper, email, SMS, and smoke signals as a potential tool for terrorism. Each of these media have different properties which make them more or less susceptible to use for wrongdoing — and more or less protective of legitimate privacy for the law-abiding.

Like most common digital communications, Twitter is a pretty weak medium for planning bad things. Copies of every post are distributed far and wide — and all “Tweets” are housed pretty much permanently by a single organization.

If you want to get caught doing something wrong, use Twitter to plan it.

Securing against terrorism is hard because terrorists don’t wear uniforms or occupy territory. Their tools are our tools: sneakers, sandwiches, credit cards, cars, steak knives, box cutters, cameras, cell phones, driver’s licenses, Web sites, Napster, Friendster, Facebook, spinach. The list goes on and on and on.

Read the rest of this post »

Applications Open for Summer 2009 Google Policy Fellowships

Posted by Jim Harper

The nice folks at Google have opened the application window for summer 2009 Google Policy Fellowships. It’s open to undergraduate, graduate, or law students interested in in the world of tech policy.

Google places policy fellows at a number of leading policy institutions in addition to Cato, and I suspect it’s a good opportunity to learn and help shape public policy at any of them.

This past summer’s Google policy fellow at Cato was Aaron Massey, who is a doctoral student in computer science at North Carolina State University. Aaron did very good work with us, and we continue to work on how identification and credentialing technologies can make us more secure without unsecuring the blessings of liberty.

(I think the highest achievement in Aaron’s young life so far, though, is winning Bruce Schneier’s Third Annual Movie-Plot Threat Contest as the inventor of Tommy Tester Toothpaste Strips.)

A tough act to follow, but I encourage you to apply, particularly people with computer science and information policy/processing backgrounds.

Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer on REAL ID

Posted by Jim Harper

I just came across the transcript of an interview with Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer (D) about the REAL ID Act. His characteristic forthrightness makes it refreshing to read.

Here’s a key point about the REAL ID Act’s attempt to coerce states into complying:

So I spoke with Chertoff and it became apparent to me that Homeland Security needed all the states worse than we needed them to do this thing.

In the early going, many state politicians were cowed by the threat that the federal government would interfere with their constituents’ travel plans if they did not go along with national standardization of their states’ ID documents.

As this interview makes clear, Secretary Chertoff and the DHS recognized that the federal government would be blamed if the Transportation Security Administration interfered with the air travel plans of millions of Americans.

DHS blinked. And it’s not the first time that happened.

Selling “Security”

Posted by Jim Harper

Imagine you are an official arriving at a disaster scene. As you approach, to your left is a burning and partially collapsed building. On an upper floor of the standing part of the building, one or two people are waving for help, evidently trapped. In the parking lot on your right are injured people, one or two of them in very dire straights, with a few Samaritans trying to render them aid.

You don’t know what caused this, but there are burned out remnants of a truck at the base of the building. It could have been a truck bomb, or it could have been an innocent crash and explosion.

Arriving behind you are firetrucks and ambulances. From the ambulances are coming people wearing white and carrying medical equipment. The people coming out of the firetrucks are carrying gas masks and wearing heavy boots and flame-retardant clothing.

What do you do? Check their IDs?

Heavens, I hope not.

But the Smart Card Alliance is trying to convince the world that disaster response and recovery scenes require machine-readable ID cards. (Their paper is being release just ahead of their big Washington, D.C. conference. See their membership list in the conference brochure.) Here’s what they say:

For both daily activities and emergency situations for [emergency response officials], it is necessary to quickly and unequivocally establish who is requesting access and what the ERO is allowed to do based on their certified skill set (e.g., medical personnel, law enforcement officer, firefighter). Without the ability to identify and qualify individuals with a high level of assurance, the response and recovery effort can be compromised, affecting the economic and human impact and the ability to return to life as normal.

On the contrary, disaster scenes are places where we rely on easy symbols like uniforms and equipment to judge who people are and what they are there to do. It is possible to contrive a situation where a wrongdoer or incompetent could access a disaster scene and do more harm, but that is precisely what it is: a contrivance. The overwhelming majority of the time, people dressed as firefighters are firefighters, generally qualified to fight fires. People dressed as Emergency Medical Technicians are almost always EMTs, generally qualified to administer emergency medical care.

Emergency scenes have all the credentialing they need. Checking a digital “smart card” at a disaster scene would be a stupid and life-threatening waste of time.

There are a lot of good things to be done with advanced identification cards and credentials. “Securing” disaster response and recovery does not seem to be one of them. The Smart Card Alliance should move along to use cases where there really are benefits rather than trying to sop up government “homeland security” money.

If the Economy Is All About Confidence…

Posted by Jim Harper

…then why are our so-called leaders in Washington doing so much fear-mongering and thrashing around?

Verizon’s CEO Ivan Seidenberg exhibits much better economic leadership than anything we’ve heard from congressional leaders, President Bush, or Treasury Secretary Paulson. He simply has confidence, and he hasn’t mistaken “investment banking” or “banking” for “the economy.”

From a WSJ Deal Journal post called “No Bailout For Me, Thanks“:

We have to retool the work force. We’re not going to do it by hunkering down,” Seidenberg told the attendees of the Dow Jones-Nielsen Media and Money conference. “We’re going to do it by reinvesting.…we can’t allow this period in which we feel bad about dislocations to take away from what America should be doing, which is creating competitive edge. If we ever lose our nerve to continue to take risk, then we’re in a lot of trouble.

While political leaders shivver in their boots and talk about confidence, here’s a genuine leader getting on with it.

The National Republican Trust PAC Is Wrong

Posted by Jim Harper

I support the right of the National Republican Trust PAC to advocate any issue it wants in any way it wants. It shouldn’t even have to file reports with the government. It’s the job of the public to distinguish messages it should believe and messages it shouldn’t.

So let me help you with that now: An email being circulated by the National Republican Trust PAC is despicable and wrong.

“Obama’s Plan: Mohamed Atta Gets His Driver’s License,” it blares. [I've been able to find no online version to link to.] The email reads:

Did you know that Mohamed Atta, the 9/11 ring leader, had a valid Florida driver’s license?

Did you know 13 of the 19 hijackers had obtained valid driver’s licenses? Armed with these licenses, eight of the hijackers even registered to vote!

Here is the shocking fact: Obama strongly supports giving illegal aliens in America driver’s licenses.

He said as much during two Democratic debates earlier this year.

This is terror-pandering of the highest order. While it’s true that several 9/11 hijackers got driver’s licenses and other documents, this has the same relationship to the success of their attacks as the brand of shoes they wore. They could have used their Saudi passports to board flights that day, and the same people in the same circumstances could get on planes today. Even if the REAL ID Act were implemented and we all carried a national ID, terrorists would not be prevented from boarding U.S. flights.

Yet there is no reason to fear. Our protection against a subsequent 9/11-style attack is the direct security of hardened cockpit doors and the awareness and vigilance of airline crews and passengers.

If it’s true that Obama would allow illegal aliens to get driver’s licenses — by the way, it wouldn’t be his decision because driver’s licenses are issued by states — it wouldn’t affect our security against terrorism.

By all appearances, this message looks like it is designed as much to raise money for the National Republican Trust PAC as to discredit Obama. Certainly, it doesn’t bring credit to Senator John McCain. In fact, it hurts him. To folks who don’t know campaign finance law, it looks like a desperate and venal grasp by McCain for an issue against Obama.

Hyping terror threats damages our country by provoking overreeactions that can be more damaging than direct attacks themselves. This message from the National Republican Trust PAC is offensive.

What Is This Drawing About?

Posted by Jim Harper

Arts+Labs, a new coalition “committed to a better, safer internet that works for both artists and consumers,” has written up Friday’s book forum on The Crime of Reason on their ArtLab blog. Author Robert B. Laughlin will present his book, then we’ll have comments from Tom Sydnor of the Progress and Freedom Foundation.

I’ve gotten a glimpse at the slides Dr. Laughlin will be using, and this Nobel laureate in physics also turns out to be something of an artist.

Join us Friday to learn what this image is all about.

How to Save E-Verify: Grow the Federal Government!

Posted by Jim Harper

The Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector has written a careful defense of the “E-Verify” program, the federal immigration background check system. Unfortunately, his prescriptions for rescuing the program would grow the government in several directions - cost and intrusiveness, to name two. At root, E-Verify and “internal enforcement” of immigration law are incompatible with life in a free country under a federal government of limited scope and power.

The paper starts with an important admission that I failed to address with sufficient force in my paper on E-Verify: Electronic Employment Eligibility Verification: Franz Kafka’s Solution to Illegal Immigration.

“Of the millions of illegal immigrants in this country,” Rector says, noting a trio of studies, “the best evidence suggests that some 50 percent to 60 percent of this employment occurs ‘on the books.’”

This means, of course, that 40 to 50 percent of illegal immigrants working in the country are “off the books.” Even a flawless E-Verify system would have no effect on their ability to work in the country. The “magnet” of working and living the United States would not even be weakened for them. Spending a billion dollars over the next four years to continue E-Verify would do about half what people think it would do.

(The $1 billion figure is Rector’s number, combining private sector and government costs. Government estimates put the five-year government cost of E-Verify at $572 million, and lost federal revenue from a similar proposed program at $178 billion over ten years.)

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Intellectual Property Laws and Government Security Threaten Science and Knowledge

Posted by Jim Harper

If you find the title of this post provocative, you’ll be interested in a Cato book forum on Friday, October 10th.

In The Crime of Reason, Nobel laureate in physics Robert Laughlin argues that intellectual property laws and government security demands threaten the dev