Category Archives: Federal government

White House establishes committee on Internet, privacy policy

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The White House is setting up a committee on the Internet and privacy, according to the Washington Post.

Reporter Cecelia King emphasizes the social media / privacy / corporate aspect of the committee’s future work, but given the Obama administration’s not-so-good track record on Internet / constitutional issues, the committee could well end up trodding merrily across the Constitution in civil rights tracking cleats. Law enforcement and domestic spooks will be well-represented on the committee. From the Post posting:

A blog post last Sunday on the National Science and Technology Council Web site said the subcommittee will include members of several federal agencies, such as the Commerce, Justice, Homeland Security and State departments. Cameron Kerry, general counsel at the Commerce Department, and Christopher Schroeder, assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, will head the group.

Representatives of the Federal Trade Commission and Federal Communications Commission were also invited. And the White House will have representatives from its Domestic Policy Council, National Economic Council, U.S. Trade Representative office and National Security Staff Cybersecurity Directorate.

“In this digital age, a thriving and dynamic economy requires Internet policies that promote innovation domestically and globally while ensuring strong and sensible protections of individuals’ private information and the ability of governments to meet their obligations to protect public safety,” Kerry and Schroeder wrote in the NSTC blog post.

Feds not chipping at Constitution, they’re blowing it up

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The Obama administration wants to keep America safe from terrorists and constitutional protections.

Mr. President, sir. If you do the latter, then the former win. You might as well turn over the keys to the country right now.

One of the administration’s latest assaults on civil liberties occurred, last week, when it argued in federal court (again) that people illegally spied upon by the federal government should not be allowed to seek redress in court because oh my gosh, there are state secrets involved! The brief was filed in response to an Electronic Frontier Foundation lawsuit challenging the government’s electronic spying program.

That’s a tune we should be familiar with by now. The government acts in a wholly illegal manner, then invokes national security to protect its spymasters and bureaucrats. From the government’s brief:

As the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) explained in his declaration asserting the state secrets privilege, the privilege extends to key evidence implicated by plaintiffs’ claims, such as whether plaintiffs themselves had been subjected to any surveillance of the type alleged in their complaints. Confirmation or denial of such claims would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security.

That argument is a head-spinner on its own merit, but the government has another layer of craziness that should propel the collective national noggin around a few more times on its axis. The feds argue that citizens should not use the courts to make the federal government obey the law.

Plaintiffs’ claims here fail to satisfy the requirements of prudential standing because they assert a generalized grievance concerning intelligence policy that is better suited to resolution by the political branches, in light of the extremely sensitive national security concerns at stake and the paramount need for secrecy.

So there you have it: the Obama administration believes in the constitution — except for those pesky parts about jury trials in civil cases, judicial authority and unreasonable search and seizure. Oh, yeah, and that separation of powers thing the framers were so careful to construct.

The Obama administration defending bad conduct with bad arguments that will be misused for decades. We will regret it.

Do people do this stuff on purpose?

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Sometimes it seems that government officials get up in the morning and say, “Hey, what can we do today to make the average citizen mistrust us even more?”

Chipping children so they can be tracked electronically seems like a pretty good answer.

The George Miller III Head Start program in Richmond, California, is putting radio frequency identification chips in kids’ jerseys so that accurate Head Start statistics can be reported to the feds. (Head Start is a federal early childhood program.)

Wow, that seems like a pretty weak reason for taking such an invasive action. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, in a letter to federal and local officials, raised some major concerns.

We have seen time and time again that RFID systems can be insecure, such as when the RFID chips in U.S. Passport cards were cracked and copied last year from a distance of 30 feet using just $250 worth of parts.4 The Real Time Location Service (RTLS) Active RFID chips embedded in these preschoolers’ jerseys can be read from up to 300 feet away.3 Children wearing these powerful tracking devices in school, on the playground, and off campus during field trips may be more vulnerable to stalking and kidnapping. If this system is insecure, someone could sit in a car the length of a football field away and track the children without anyone ever knowing that any information had been read. Once read, that information could then be copied to a duplicate chip — allowing someone to take a child off campus while RFID readers potentially show the child is still safely in school.

Nor does a child have to face stalking or abduction to be endangered by RFID tracking data. These RFID chips provide constant monitoring, potentially creating a detailed portrait of a child’s movements that could loom large over a youngster’s life, particularly if the chips replace direct adult monitoring and judgment. If RFID records show a child moving around a lot, might she be tagged as hyperactive? How long could this data — and the conclusions rightly or wrongly drawn from it — be stored in school records? Might the records be subpoenaed for use in family court or a custody battle?

The folks in Richmond and in the federal government need to rethink this one. Tracking children to enhance record-keeping is the very top of a very steep and slipper slope that we won’t want to go sliding down.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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Power is always abused, eventually.

So be afraid, be very afraid, about what our national security apparatus is up to these days. When you have too many law enforcement types chasing too few bad guys, as the US government does now, you are going to end up with bored or corrupt federal agents going after the wrong people through ineptitude, spite or ideology.

Scarier yet: first the Bush administration, then the Obama administration, knocked down rules and the rule of law to give this overpopulated policing world more power and the policed world far less protection from its protectors.

Fareed Zakaria, writing in Newsweek, laid out some details:

Since September 11, 2001, the U.S. government has created or reconfigured at least 263 organizations to tackle some aspect of the war on terror. The amount of money spent on intelligence has risen by 250 percent, to $75 billion (and that’s the public number, which is a gross underestimate). That’s more than the rest of the world spends put together. Thirty-three new building complexes have been built for intelligence bureaucracies alone, occupying 17 million square feet—the equivalent of 22 U.S. Capitols or three Pentagons. Five miles southeast of the White House, the largest government site in 50 years is being built—at a cost of $3.4 billion—to house the largest bureaucracy after the Pentagon and the Department of Veterans Affairs: the Department of Homeland Security, which has a workforce of 230,000 people.

This new system produces 50,000 reports a year—136 a day!—which of course means few ever get read. Those senior officials who have read them describe most as banal; one tells me, “Many could be produced in an hour using Google.” Fifty-one separate bureaucracies operating in 15 states track the flow of money to and from terrorist organizations, with little information-sharing.

Some 30,000 people are now employed exclusively to listen in on phone conversations and other communications in the United States. And yet no one in Army intelligence noticed that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had been making a series of strange threats at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he trained. The father of the Nigerian “Christmas bomber” reported his son’s radicalism to the U.S. Embassy. But that message never made its way to the right people in this vast security apparatus. The plot was foiled only by the bomber’s own incompetence and some alert passengers.

Such mistakes might be excusable. But the rise of this national-security state has entailed a vast expansion in the government’s powers that now touches every aspect of American life, even when seemingly unrelated to terrorism. The most chilling aspect of Dave Eggers’s heartbreaking book, Zeitoun, is that the federal government’s fastest and most efficient response to Hurricane Katrina was the creation of a Guantánamo-like prison facility (in days!) in which 1,200 American citizens were summarily detained and denied any of their constitutional rights for months, a suspension of habeas corpus that reads like something out of a Kafka novel.

Everyone feel safer now?