Last week Congress voted to encourage participation in the 2010 census. I voted “No” on this resolution for the simple, obvious reason that the census — like so many government programs — has grown far beyond what the framers of our Constitution intended. The invasive nature of the current census raises serious questions about how and why government will use the collected information. It also demonstrates how the federal bureaucracy consistently encourages citizens to think of themselves in terms of groups, rather than as individual Americans. The not so subtle implication is that each group, whether ethnic, religious, social, or geographic, should speak up and demand its “fair share” of federal largesse.

Article I, section 2 of the Constitution calls for an enumeration of citizens every ten years, for the purpose of apportioning congressional seats among the various states. In other words, the census should be nothing more than a headcount. It was never intended to serve as a vehicle for gathering personal information on citizens.

But our voracious federal government thrives on collecting information. In fact, to prepare for the 2010 census state employees recorded GPS coordinates for every front door in the United States so they could locate individuals with greater accuracy! Once duly located, individuals are asked detailed questions concerning their name, address, race, home ownership, and whether they periodically spend time in prison or a nursing home — just to name a few examples.

From a constitutional perspective, of course, the answer to each of these questions is: “None of your business.” But the bigger question is — why government is so intent on compiling this information in the first place?

The Census Bureau claims that collected information is not shared with any federal agency; but rather is kept under lock and key for 72 years. It also claims that no information provided to census takers can be used against you by the government.

However, these promises can and have been abused in the past. Census data has been used to locate men who had not registered for the draft. Census data also was used to find Japanese-Americans for internment camps during World War II. Furthermore, the IRS has applied census information to detect alleged tax evaders. Some local governments even have used census data to check for compliance with zoning regulations.

It is not hard to imagine that information compiled by the census could be used against people in the future, despite claims to the contrary and the best intentions of those currently in charge of the Census Bureau. The government can and does change its mind about these things, and people have a right to be skeptical about government promises.

Yet there are consequences for not submitting to the census and its intrusive questions. If the form is not mailed back in time, households will experience the “pleasure” of a visit by a government worker asking the questions in person. If the government still does not get the information it wants, it can issue a fine of up to $5000.

If the federal government really wants to increase compliance with the census, it should abide by the Constitution and limit its inquiry to one simple question: How many people live here?

The U.S. Department of Agriculture will announce Friday that it is dropping a controversial plan to track livestock.

The National Animal Identification System began as a voluntary program in which each animal on a farm would be tracked with a unique identification number and stored in a federal database. The Bush administration created the program in 2004 after a report of mad cow disease in 2003.

Government officials said the program would have made it easier to track disease outbreaks and isolate sick animals, but critics said the program imposed costly and onerous requirements on small farmers and feared that the government would eventually make it mandatory and use it to pry into farmers’ lives.

Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack, former governor of Iowa, held public meetings on the NAIS program in 2009 and heard stiff opposition.

“It was just overwhelming in the country that people didn’t like it, and I think they took that feedback to heart,” said Mary Kay Thatcher, public policy director of the American Farm Bureau Federation, which had opposed the identification system. “I think it’s good they’ve at least said we’re going to do something different.” — New York Times

The department still plans to create rules for livestock transported in interstate commerce, but will leave overall livestock tracking to the states.

["Oreo Cows" photo by Shea Hazarian; CC BY 2.0]

An error in a national criminal record database cost Eschol Amelia Studnitz her job.

The 59 year old Carroll County, Md., resident was working as a senior accountant for Corporate Mailing Services of Arbutus last summer when the Social Security Administration, which had just awarded it a contract to handle mail, told the company that she was “unsuitable” to obtain a required level 1 security clearance to work on the contract. SSA never explained why.

As a result, CMS immediately fired Studnitz, giving her just a few minutes to collect her personal effects.

Just days later, SSA sent a second notice to the company saying that Studnitz had been pre-screen approved. No mention was made of the previous letter. But by that time it was too late.

It turns out that the original error came from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Crime Information Center database, which SSA uses as part of its security clearance screening. But it took intervention on the part of Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) to discover the error.

TheBaltimore Sun reported the horrifying story of what such an error in a government database can do.

“This is a horrible injustice to her,” said Lillie Coney, associate director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. But Coney said she was not surprised the error involved the FBI’s National Crime Information Center database.

“There have been several well-publicized incidents involving inaccuracies in the NCIC database,” she said, some dating back 20 years. According to online Maryland court records, a nursing home won an $11,676 civil judgment against Studnitz in 2005, but she says that actually involved her late father’s estate. She has no criminal record.

Still, Studnitz appears to have limited legal options, said Marley Weiss, a University of Maryland law professor. CMS has no obligation to rehire her. Nonunion, private-sector workers can be fired for “any reason or no reason,” except for a prohibited basis such as race or age.

A lawsuit against the government would be difficult, she predicted, because public agencies may argue they have immunity from such claims. “Of course,” Weiss said, “there is an extreme sense of unfairness to this.” — Baltimore Sun

To add insult to injury, an FBI spokesman told theSun that it does not track errors in the NCIC database. NCIC relies on data submitted to it by state and local governments, much of which is erroneous before the FBI even receives it.

A 2005Wired News investigation into inaccuracies in private databases managed by companies such as ChoicePoint found that in Texas, for instance, “the Texas DPS was notorious for having incomplete, out-of-date and missing criminal records.” These are the records purchased by companies like ChoicePoint as well as forwarded on to the NCIC database.

Many companies are now performing background checks using such databases to screen prospective employees and sometimes even current employees. People who have lost their jobs or job offers due to database errors like these have generally been able to get the databases corrected, but aren’t generally successful at getting their jobs back — or getting hired. And in the meantime they’re unemployed, living on unemployment checks, savings, or worse.

Experts recommend you check your credit report regularly for errors or unusual activity that could indicate identity theft. Maybe you should also check your own criminal background and find out which state you’re a registered sex offender in, which state has a warrant out for your arrest, and how many years you supposedly spent in prison for some crime you never had anything to do with.

Even with Rep. Bartlett working on Studnitz’s case, it seems unlikely she’ll get her job back. CMS’s president dithered in a statement to theSun, saying only that, “We’re still working through this process. It’s unresolved.” But in an October 21 letter, the company now says she was fired for poor performance, an allegation she disputes.

There are several lessons I hope you’ll take away from this. First, relying on government to do anything right — even something it supposedly should do like maintaining a criminal database — is risky; government is made up of people, and people make mistakes. Government just provides a structure where people within it can make more mistakes than normal and not have to suffer consequences for them. (This is known as sovereign immunity.) Second, I’ve noticed over the years that people have this unwarranted trust of anything they see on a computer screen. Computers are only as accurate as the data they’re given, and that’s done by people — who, as we all know, make mistakes. Third, correcting a mistake in a computer database is easy; far easier, in fact, than the bureaucracy required to convince the people in charge of the database to fix the mistake, and far easier even than navigating the corporate bureaucracy required to get one’s job back, if that can be done at all.

(Hat tip: Threat Level)

What have you got to hide? The answer may shock you: If you’re like most Americans, you have far more than you realize that you need to be hiding, and not doing so may be putting you and your family in grave danger.

In his new book, Three Felonies a Day, attorney Harvey Silverglate holds that the typical American professional commits an average of three federal crimes a day, just going about their daily business, without even realizing it. And the only thing keeping them out of prison — make that keeping you out of prison — is the fact that federal prosecutors haven’t looked at you yet. “No social class or profession is safe from this troubling form of social control by the executive branch,” reads a statement on the book’s Web site, “and nothing less than the integrity of our constitutional democracy hangs in the balance.”

WhileThree Felonies a Day illustrates the problem quite well, today I want to talk about solutions. Likely you have never thought you needed to protect yourself from the government. But you probably weren’t aware that so many federal laws are “impossibly broad and vague” that you were a “criminal” several times over today, just for going to work, picking up your kids, and eating dinner. Moreover, the concept of criminal intent has been largely removed from the law, so you can be imprisoned even if you had no idea what you were doing was against the law.

Under the English common law we inherited, a crime requires intent. This protection is disappearing in the U.S. As Mr. Silverglate writes, “Since the New Deal era, Congress has delegated to various administrative agencies the task of writing the regulations,” even as “Congress has demonstrated a growing dysfunction in crafting legislation that can in fact be understood.” Prosecutors identify defendants to go after instead of finding a law that was broken and figuring out who did it. Expect more such prosecutions as Washington adds regulations. — Wall Street Journal

One of the most powerful solutions against the sorts of miscarriages of justice that land people like you in prison is privacy. Privacy makes it much harder for an overzealous prosecutor to spin your perfectly innocent activities into “crimes.” Not to mention it also provides protection against the more mundane threats of identity thieves, psychotic ex-spouses, and so on.

A few people figured out long ago that the federal government wasn’t actually here to help, and one of them, “Boston T. Party,” (a pen name) in 1996 wroteBulletproof Privacy, now out of print. The thin volume, most of which is now quite dated, provided a how-to manual with practical solutions for increasing your personal privacy. Boston has since rewritten and expanded it, and the new book, One Nation, Under Surveillance, is three times the size, and has at least three times the practical solutions for protecting yourself.

(I met Boston at this year’s New Hampshire Liberty Forum where he spoke on gun rights in the U.S. after theD.C. v. Heller case. He graciously sent me a signed copy ofOne Nation, Under Surveillance for free. Unfortunately it got buried under a huge stack of papers on my desk for several months and I only recently found it again.)

Privacy is an insurance policy against oppression. Privacy allows a tyrannized citizenry to think independently, freely, and clearly. (Imagine if book stores were regulated as gun stores!) To speak out, network, and organize against unruly government — all of this in perfect accord with your natural rights, and in tradition with our American history and Constitution. We did not form the servile institution of government for the goal of limitless obedience to that servant. Neither did the States federate themselves under the Constitution for the utter dissolution of their own autonomy and prerogatives. . . .

A government which knows everything about its people is an unassailable government, for the people can no longer safely congregate nor precipitate. In an Orwellian state in which all your communications, transactions, and associations are monitored/approved, from whence comes any possible readjustment — much less a successful revolution from it? . . .

When privacy goes, the people have in a sense “thrown away the key” to their shackles. Think of your decreasing privacy as being measured for a tailored straightjacket.

What do you have to hide? Today, perhaps nothing. Next year, maybe a lot depending on new information and revised priorities. Privacy is a comprehensive insurance policy. Keep up the premiums, even if you’re not quite sure why.

I’m not going to share much of the how-to with you. That’s in the book, which you should buy. Now. Or even months ago, and I’m sorry this thing sat under a bunch of junk on my desk for so long. I learned quite a few things I never knew, and refreshed myself on those I did. The thing about many of the privacy techniques shown in the book is that in order to protect your privacy most effectively, they have to be in place already before you are threatened.

That means you — no matter how innocent you think you are — need to protect yourself.

Virtually everything imaginable is covered, most in great detail. A few topics were not covered in detail, such as creating alternate identities, or trusts and financial instruments, since the information tends to go out of date rapidly, or would require their own books, or might be illegal to even talk about (in the supposed land of the free). So it is not a complete how-to, but it is nearly complete.

Most of the expanded content in this book deals with online privacy. This was hardly an issue in 1996 whenBulletproof Privacy was published and almost nobody had even heard of the Internet; today virtually everyone is online and too few people on the Internet do much of anything to protect their privacy. Consider the fugitive who fled to Mexico and then updated his status on Facebook. “People just don’t think through the privacy implications of putting their information on the Internet,” security expert Bruce Schneier wrote Monday. “Facebook is how we interact with friends, and we think of it in the frame of interacting with friends. We don’t think that our employers might be looking — they’re not our friends! — that the information will be around forever, or that it might be abused. Privacy isn’t salient; chatting with friends is.”

The sections dealing with securing your computer and being private online are valuable content and the book is worth buying for this alone; Boston covered pretty much everything, from e-mail to cookies to malware to encryption to government raids. I did spot a few technical errors, but nothing that invalidated the techniques presented.

I do have a few minor nits to pick, though. The first is that I don’t feel enough attention was given to risk assessment. Any security expert will tell you that knowing what risks you face, how likely they are to occur, and how disruptive they would be if they occurred, is critical information in determining what you need to do to protect yourself. Boston assumes that his readers want as much privacy as possible, almost without regard to cost or inconvenience. I would have liked to see more treatment of specific risks and how particular techniques mitigate those risks, as well as how to assess risk generally. This, I think, would make the book more accessible and more useful to a wider audience.

Second, I will have to share one of Boston’s techniques. He recommends using Puppy Linux, a stripped down operating system distribution which can run from a CD or USB stick, instead of having your operating system installed on your hard drive. Puppy Linux can also encrypt your data and save it back to the same USB stick, which he recommends. This is probably workable for some people, and is practically necessary when using a public computer (since they can’t be trusted) but other people will be entirely unable to do this, myself included. His advice to never, ever use Windows for anything is sound, of course. But I do many things which pretty much require an installed operating system, such as video editing. For people who can’t live off a USB stick, I would recommend you install Ubuntu or Fedora, both of which are much more full-featured and also offer simple full-disk encryption for your hard drive which is stronger than that provided in Puppy Linux. (I helped test the full-disk encryption feature in Fedora and contributed a few small bits of code to it.)

Finally, with the rapid changes in technology, and the relentless encroachment of government into every aspect of people’s lives, doubtless much of the information inOne Nation, Under Surveillance will be out of date, useless, or even potentially dangerous soon. I would like to see some sort of web site to serve as an online addendum to the book, which could contain errata, new information, perhaps a wiki, etc. Many books, especially dealing with technical topics, have such sites already and they serve to add further value.

One Nation, Under Surveillance should be on the bookshelf of anyone serious about privacy, both online and offline. If you aren’t sure, but you think you might need some privacy in the future, you should use it to get started now. By the time you’re sure you need privacy, it may be too late.

And if you’ll excuse me, I need to clean my desk.

You haven’t done anything wrong, so why should you worry about surveillance? It was Cardinal Richelieu who said, “If you give me six lines written by the most honest man, I will find something in them to hang him.” The United States doesn’t hang innocent people any more, but it certainly does imprison them by the millions, and occasionally does kill them.

So why worry about surveillance, if you are honest? As the Miranda saying goes, anything can be used against you in a court of law. Law enforcement’s job is to come up with things to use against you, and the most innocent bits of data, combined together in ways you might not expect, can paint the most honest, innocent person as a criminal. Someday you could find yourself on trial for a crime you never committed, for instance, or you could be detained for hours every time you try to board an airplane or cross the border.

Last week the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched its Surveillance Self-Defense project, an online guide for protecting your private data against government spying. EFF created the guide, it said in a news release, “to educate Americans about the law and technology of communications surveillance and computer searches and seizures, and to provide the information and tools necessary to keep their private data out of the government’s hands.”

After all, data the government doesn’t have can’t be used against you. I presume, of course, that you are innocent of wrongdoing, and it is for innocent people that this guide is designed: activists who use their First Amendment rights to lobby for changes in government policy, for example, or ordinary Americans who get caught up in a criminal investigation due to a computer error, or simple human mistake such as police serving a warrant at the wrong house. Unfortunately this sort of thing happens far too often.

“Despite a long and troubling history in this country of the government abusing its surveillance powers, most Americans know very little about how the law protects them or about how they can take steps to protect themselves against government surveillance,” said EFF senior staff attorney Kevin Bankston. “The Surveillance Self-Defense project offers citizens a legal and technical toolkit with tips on how to defend themselves in case the government attempts to search, seize, subpoena or spy on their most private data.”

The site explains the law in the United States as it applies to what data the law enforcement and intelligence communities can obtain about you and how they obtain it. It then covers in depth how to protect your personal data on your computer, as it is in transit over the Internet, and while it is held by third parties. Importantly, it also provides an easy to understand overview of what security is and how to assess your personal security risks so that you can implement security measures which make sense for your own circumstances. Finally it covers specific security measures and technologies which you can use to protect yourself.

I’ve reviewed the site myself and I highly recommend it for anyone who has even the slightest possibility of being targeted by the government for any reason. And, unfortunately, that means every single individual, since, but for happenstance, the next person who gets their house mistakenly raided and their dog shot to death by a SWAT team could be you. Protecting your privacy using these techniques won’t guarantee your security, of course, but it will certainly reduce the likelihood of becoming the next victim of government surveillance.

It’s that time again, time for outgoing government bureaucrats to make room for fresh new faces and to say goodbye. Today, outgoing Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff said goodbye to the country in a video. Of course, the government can’t seem to do anything right, and now we can add making simple videos to that list.

“I’m here at the Freedom Center, one of the many facilities created after the Sept. 11th attacks to protect our country from terrorist threats and to improve coordination during major disasters and emergencies,” Chertoff says to introduce himself. “In this case, threats to our aviation system.”

Formerly known as the Transportation Security Operations Center, it was renamed last year to the Freedom Center. The operations center is responsible for virtually all of the Transportation Security Administration’s day to day activities, including preventing infants and Congressmen from boarding planes and responding to other threats to aviation security.

You may as well just watch the video. I’ll warn you now, it’s rather poor quality. It’s not YouTube’s fault; this is how it was received from DHS. Apparently even Windows Movie Maker is beyond them.

Someone get this man a glass of water!

Chertoff says we are “far better protected and far better equipped to deal with 21st-century threats” than before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Of course this says absolutely nothing about whether the American people are actually any safer, and it can be argued that we are not.

“We’ve completely overhauled our aviation security system,” Chertoff reminds us, as if we hadn’t noticed. “Today, more than 20 layers of security protect air travelers, from hardened cockpit doors and Federal Air Marshals to 100 percent screening of passengers and bags.”

Which of those layers of security actually works? Fake boarding passes, guns and bombs — real ones — getting onto planes, rigged internal tests, and more show that aviation security remains as fragile as ever. Your kids could probably hijack a plane, if it ever entered their mind.

And then there’s the border. Chertoff boasts about the hundreds of miles of new border fencing, a few spots of which he welded himself as a publicity stunt, the new surveillance technology, thousands of new Border Patrol agents, and hundreds of thousands deported. Yet the border remains porous since it’s easy enough to go over, under, through — or most frequently, around — the few spots where fences exist. And it’s easy enough for at least some people to evade thousands of Border Patrol agents, too.

Not to mention what is bound to happen when illegal immigrants build sections of the fence.

“There’s a transformation taking place in border towns and communities that were once plagued by drug smuggling and overrun with illegal immigrants,” Chertoff says. The transformation, of course, is that different border towns and communities are now overrun with illegal immigrants. Sort of.

It seems that over the last year, fewer people have been immigrating to the U.S. illegally. “This is a direct result of heightened security and enforcement,” according to Chertoff. According to the illegal immigrants, it’s a direct result of the U.S. economy going straight to hell. With so many people out of work, we need those jobs to go to Americans, right?

“We’ve cracked down on employers who blatantly violate immigration laws,” Chertoff says, “while giving businesses better tools, like E-Verify, to maintain a legal workforce.” After all, those millions of people in Michigan who need a job are going to travel halfway across the country to work in a meat packing plant, right? Somehow I don’t think that’s going to happen.

Of course, to ensure the workforce is legal, the workforce has to be identified. “We’ve implemented new standards for secure driver’s licenses across the United States to prevent the use of fraudulent or stolen documents,” Chertoff says. That’s the much-maligned REAL ID Act.

Nobody is required by law to have an ID in this country. Unless they want to do things like open a bank account, or get a job, or travel. It’s a distinction without a difference, since virtually everyone is thereby forced to carry their papers just to live from day to day, and in most circumstances, forced to show them on demand. And the requirement to show your ID at the airport doesn’t even make you any safer. Chertoff even admitted as much.

Chertoff goes on to mention new regulations on chemical facilities and transportation of chemicals by rail, as well as deployment of “early-warning surveillance systems to 30 major metropolitan areas under our BioWatch program” to warn of a biological attack. In 2005, those sensors went off in Washington, D.C., right in the middle of an anti-war protest. It appears to have been a malfunction.

“Finally,” Chertoff saves the best for last, “we’ve integrated lessons from Hurricane Katrina and other disasters to ensure the federal government is fully prepared to support our state and local partners and the American people during a major disaster.” Chertoff says he’s given FEMA more power, improved emergency communications somewhat, and improved coordination with other government agencies and the private sector. It remains to be seen what the results will be, but if you’re in an area that has natural disasters, I wouldn’t place my bets on the government being there to save you. Government is, after all, the world’s largest man-made disaster.

Chertoff is clearly proud of what his department has accomplished over the four years he has been at its head. He’s managed to spend countless billions of dollars creating and growing a bureaucracy the sole purpose of which is to take Americans’ essential liberties and trade them in for a false sense of security, all the while maintaining almost the lowest morale of any government agency through poor — or nonexistent — management.

To give credit where credit is due, Homeland Security actually has managed to do some things right. I just can’t think of what they are right now.

Would anyone fly again if they knew the government’s security procedures weren’t intended to make people safe, but only to make them feel safe?

Would you?

Perhaps you’d better buy a bus ticket or set up a videoconference, then, because Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff admitted that at least one aspect of aviation security is intended to be security theater, not real security.

At a speech he gave August 13 at the University of Southern California National Center for Risk and Economic Analysis of Terrorism Events, Chertoff expounded at length on the supposed virtues of government identification. And much of what he said was right. You certainly don’t want your bank to give all your money to someone else who just claims to be you, for instance.

Chertoff said that current measures like REAL ID were only stopgaps and that “21st century” approaches to identity management would require two-factor or even three-factor authentication.

But the use of identification by government, he says, is only about verifying that someone is who he claims to be. Depending on the situation, this doesn’t necessarily provide any security. He spent quite a bit of time talking about requiring identification to get on an airplane, for instance. And God help you if you lost your wallet. If that happens, you’ll have to answer a variety of highly personal questions, as well as go through the dreaded secondary screening, and risk having your name placed on a terrorist watch list.

And what does all this identification to get on an airplane get you, the traveler? Absolutely nothing but a false sense of security. Chertoff even brazenly admitted it: “From a security standpoint, anonymity has to give way to the right of others on the plane to feel safe.” That’s right, identification isn’t about catching terrorists, it’s about giving your fellow passengers a warm fuzzy feeling. Of course, we’ve known that for years.

Chertoff even brought up a hypothetical market experiment in which an airline would allow travelers to fly anonymously, and who would choose that airline over the one which identified people? Of course, this isn’t the market experiment that has been proposed before that would actually work: allowing people to fly carrying their firearms, anonymously or not. That would provide real security, but who would fly an airline where they were actually safe, instead of just feeling safe? What terrorist would go up against a planeload of responsible armed Americans still pissed off about September 11?

Most interestingly, though, Chertoff said the government should accept future forms of private identification which meet government standards for security: “I would challenge the private sector to come up with methods and forms and systems of identification that would meet these performance metrics, that would accurately identify a person who’s been validated, working from a respected breeder document or some kind of database that truly verifies and validates identity, and that satisfies the security measures because I believe that we should then be in a position in the government to say we’ll accept that identification.”

This is clearly the right direction to move in. The need for identification varies widely based on context, and a one-size-fits-all approach like the driver license either doesn’t work for some contexts or is complete overkill for others. After all, that system started as a way to verify that a person had permission to drive. Feature creep has resulted in it being used in so many other inappropriate contexts today, and has also enabled the widespread identity theft we see.

For instance, I traveled extensively earlier this year and about half the time, the hotel or motel I checked into would ask for an ID. The hotel really doesn’t need to know who I am; it only needs to know that I will pay for the hotel room and any damage I might cause to the room during my stay. The one-size-fits-all government ID may make the hotel management feel better, but it doesn’t truly serve this purpose. (Higher rated hotels were, in my experience, less likely to ask for ID. They solve this problem by charging any damages to the credit card after check-out.)

Not coincidentally, Cato’s Jim Harper also calls for private identification systems in his book, Identity Crisis. Multiple private identification systems, customized for specific use cases, would solve most or all of these problems.

Those of you among my readers who consider yourselves voluntaryists or anarchists, or even those of you who are concerned about government overuse and misuse of identification, should start working on private identification systems as soon as possible. If you’re here in New Hampshire, I’ll help.

Protesters gathered Wednesday afternoon at the opening of the RFID in Fashion conference in New York City to urge clothing manufacturers and retailers not to embed tracking chips into articles of clothing.

The industry conference, one of several hosted byRFID Journal magazine, allows clothing manufacturers to learn the state of the RFID industry and meet with RFID suppliers and industry executives. RFID, or radio frequency identification, is a small chip with a unique identifying number which can be read from as far away as 30 feet. The RFID in Fashion conference is being held Wednesday and Thursday at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.

But at this conference, the industry is urging clothing manufacturers to embed RFID chips directly into their clothing for purposes of inventory control and loss prevention, known in the industry as item-level tagging, according to consumer privacy expert Katherine Albrecht, who co-authored the book on RFID, Spychips. And that raises what she calls a “privacy nightmare.”

“We’re here to let the industry know that consumers don’t want tracking devices in their clothing,” Albrecht said. “When they embed [RFID] into clothing, or shoes, or other items people wear or carry, they can also put the readers to pick up those signals into floors, doorways, ceiling tiles, anywhere people go, and use them to track and identify people.”

Retailers would create databases linking individual RFID chips to consumers at the point of purchase, creating a database of what each person bought which would allow businesses or governments to keep tabs on every individual passing through a given area. The technology to accomplish this tracking, Albrecht says, has already been developed.

A conference attendee who could not be identified because he is not authorized to speak for his company said that such tags would be decommissioned before the customer left the store. But Albrecht responded that the tags would merely be placed in a dormant state and could be reawakened at any time, as it would be too expensive to use tags which could be deactivated permanently.

“You can’t put your clothing in the microwave to kill these chips, because it could catch fire,” she said.

Some attendees actually stopped to talk with the 14 protesters and present their case. An attendee who could not be identified because he is not authorized to speak for his employer spent nearly an hour talking to protesters and pointing out that RFID has good uses as well. “There’s potential for abuse in everything,” he said. “All of those retailers, all they care about is making sure they have the right products at the right time, and actually saving money.”

Police did not interfere with the protest at all. One off-duty NYPD officer who could not appear on camera for personal safety reasons showed his police ID and pointed out that it contains a tracking device which allows the officer to be located in the event of an emergency. Security staff spoke to Albrecht and told her that they agreed with the protest, she said.

The trouble with databases is that despite every possible precaution, they can fall into the wrong hands. These databases will be an inviting target for today’s criminals, for whom obtaining data is the first step to committing a crime. In addition, once such a database is created, the tracking will inevitably follow. Government will be unable to resist having yet another way to track, monitor and control people, built by hapless companies who are just trying to save a few bucks.

Video of some of the protest follows:

Raw video of Albrecht interview by Chinese-language broadcaster NTDTV:

You check in at the airline ticket counter. But instead of a boarding pass, you get shackled with an electronic bracelet which tracks your every move, contains all your personal information, and can shock you senseless. This vision of the future of air security is being floated around the Department of Homeland Security’s research and development office.

According to a video promoting the so-called EMD Safety Bracelet, all airline passengers would be required to wear it “until they disembark the flight at their destination.”

The device, in addition to storing all of your sensitive personal information and tracking you with GPS, would allow someone to activate it remotely and immobilize the wearer for several minutes. This is EMD, or electro-muscular disruption.

And the Department of Homeland Security is interested in buying them.

According to a letter from Paul S. Ruwaldt of the DHS Science and Technology Directorate, the department is interested in using them to control illegal immigrants as well as “prisoner transportation, detainee control and . . . to improve air security, on passenger planes.”

Would every paying airline passenger flying on a commercial airplane be mandated to wear one of these devices? I cringe at the thought. Not only could it be used as a physical restraining device, but also as a method of interrogation, according to the same aforementioned letter from Mr. Ruwaldt.

Would you let them put one of those on your wrist? Would you allow the airline employees, which would be mandated by the government, to place such a bracelet on any member of your family?

Why are tax dollars being spent on something like this? Is this a police state or is it America? — Washington Times

While you’re celebrating your paid day off work today, government officials are hard at work looking for new and innovative ways to take away your freedom. You thought they were protecting your freedom?

Here’s what will happen if these things ever get used on airplanes. First, a lot of people will simply refuse to fly. Who can blame them? A lot more will refuse to fly when the first reports of how these things get used surface. One “unruly” passenger starts making noise on the plane and the crew, who have this nice shock collar device, aren’t going to spend a few minutes looking up which of the 87 passengers he is, especially if they “feel threatened.” They’re just going to shock everyone on the plane. Including you and your kids.

But, you asked for security and gave up your freedom for it, and now you’re going to get it.

(Via)

Update: DHS spokesman John Verrico denies that these bracelets will be used for air passengers. See his full statement below.

The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators received a no-bid contract worth millions of dollars to implement a “verification hub” connecting state and federal databases under the REAL ID program.

AAMVA, which already maintains a database of commercial drivers in every state, was believed to be the company that would get the contract for the verification hub which, when completed, will allow states to electronically verify documents such as birth certificates and Social Security cards with other states and with the federal government.

The database begins with a $17 million REAL ID Demonstration Grant awarded to the state of Missouri, which will then pass on that cash to AAMVA to do the actual work of developing the system. Four other states, Florida, Indiana, Nevada, and Wisconsin, received $1.2 million grants to be the first states to connect to the new database.

The grants were a portion of nearly $80 million in grants awarded to 48 states and territories to implement various parts of REAL ID in those states. Every state and territory which applied for funding received at least $300,000, according to DHS. Only Alaska, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma and Washington state did not apply for funding. Many of those states are not participating in REAL ID.

That $80 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the estimated $11 billion price tag for REAL ID. It’s like getting two cents when you need $30.

AAMVA calculates the final costs of building out the database would reach as high as $130 million. AAMVA maintains its driver’s license database through a contract with EDS Corp. of Plano, Texas.

Meanwhile, EDS currently charges AMMVA a maintenance fee for maintaining its commercial driver records. That charge, according to sources, is $0.08334 per month for each record. Under REAL ID, then, EDS could become responsible for maintaining up to 240 million driver records across the United States, potentially netting EDS as much as $240 million per year merely for maintaining commercial driver records. — Homeland Security Today

Homeland Stupidity was the first to note that AAMVA would likely get the contract for the central database which linked the states together under REAL ID.

DHS has said the central verification hub will not diminish privacy or put people at risk. And I have a million bushels of Iowa corn to sell you.

“Personally identifiable information, beyond the minimum information necessary to appropriately route verification queries, will not be stored,” reads a statement on the DHS web site regarding the verification hub. Sounds good, right? Take a second look. It’s a carefully worded statement. That “minimum information necessary” just happens to include, well, all your most important identity information: your name, birthdate, Social Security number, driver license number, address, and perhaps a few other things I can’t think of offhand. That’s more than enough to keep a corrupt employee or a hacker in stolen identities forever.

“Americans overwhelmingly want secure identification, and this funding will help those states working to provide it,” said Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. “We’ve made it more affordable for states to implement REAL ID by dramatically cutting costs and providing various and considerable funding options, and we’re requesting additional funding next year.”

If Americans overwhelmingly wanted REAL ID, why didn’t Congress just bring it up for a vote on its own merits, instead of sneaking it in the back door attached to an Iraq war funding bill?

It seems to me that Americans overwhelmingly want to be safe. But what threats do Americans really face? Terrorism doesn’t even belong on the radar; it’s too rare an occurrence. Accidents and crime certainly do belong on the radar. But the biggest threat to any given American’s security is his own government. These are the people who can harm or kill you and get away with it.

When you consider privacy (and by the way, privacy is a form of security; by giving it up you make yourself more vulnerable) you must consider that the government, the only institution which can get away with unjustly hurting or killing you — and which routinely does so — has all your information, and they can change the “rules” at any time.

This is just one more way in which the government is putting you in danger.

So far the federal government has done little to respond to the historic floods in eastern Iowa which are among the worst in recorded history. In order to maintain tyranny in the flooded areas, local governments have had to step up to meet the challenge.

Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff said Friday that he was pleased with the federal government’s virtually invisible response to the Midwest flooding, which in some areas exceeded 500-year plan levels and has destroyed millions of acres of crops across six states and displaced tens of thousands of people.

There have been no complaints about the federal response, because the federal government hasn’t done much of anything to date.

According to the Associated Press, federal response in the immediate aftermath of the flooding consisted of “moving federal assistance into the regions quickly and not waiting for bureaucratic declarations [and] setting up field offices with state and local officials.” These preparations will come in handy later when people start filing their applications for FEMA money, but in the meantime, for bungling and stupidity, we must look instead to state and local response.

In Cedar Rapids, where the Cedar River crested at 31.1 feet Friday, flooding nine square miles and displacing over 24,000 people, police have cordoned off large areas of the town and have sent in so-called “strike teams” to “inspect” houses as floodwaters begin to recede. On Friday, police chief Greg Graham said that while firefighters would enter homes through unlocked doors and windows, law enforcement would not enter homes. Yet video evidence has surfaced that police officers were not only entering homes, but breaking down locked doors and windows to do so.

Police officer Josh Bell, seen in this video breaking into a home and threatening a nearby resident, is described by a person who has known him since high school as a “prick cop” who had psychological problems including trouble socializing with his peers. Bell has certainly gotten his revenge against the society which “once threw him out into the hall butt ass naked after swim class.” Now he’s the big man with a gun, and he plays the tyrant role well. Notice how he goes for his gun while he’s breaking and entering.

Iowa National Guard assists Cedar Rapids police in keeping people out of flooded areas of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (SSgt. Oscar Sanchez/U.S. Air Force)

Police officers manning these checkpoints are still keeping people out, even though floodwaters are receding. They even arrested one man at gunpoint who attempted to drive past a checkpoint on Monday. Rick Blazek, 54, was dragged from his truck at gunpoint and arrested after police say he hit one of them with his truck three times while trying to drive around the checkpoint. Three times? Did the officer just keep jumping in front of the truck? The officer, of course, was not injured at all.

Yet some people still think the police and other bureaucrats are there to protect them, because — at least this week — that’s what they seem to be doing.

“They are keeping us out of our homes even though we’re getting upset with them,” resident Veronica Johnson told CNN. “We have no right [to be upset] because they’re trying to protect us.”

Indeed. Strike teams are tagging houses as they inspect them, with green stickers meaning the house is safe to enter, yellow stickers meaning the house is damaged but safe, red stickers meaning the house is unsafe, and purple stickers meaning the government will come by later and forcibly demolish the home.

Pray you don’t come home and find a red or purple sticker. You could get arrested and jailed for going into your own home, because the government’s idea of protecting you from yourself is pointing guns at you and forcing you into one of their own small metal boxes, and perhaps killing you. Either way your life is at risk, either from nature or from the people who you thought were protecting you.

Remember, these people are under no obligation to protect you from anything. It’s not part of the social contract. They can let you die if it suits them, and your survivors have no legal recourse. The only reason they go to all this trouble is to preserve their illusion of legitimacy and make you think that they should have control over every aspect of your life, for your own good.

These are not people to be respected; there is nothing respectable about how they do what they do. They may instead be feared, but above all they must be opposed, for not only violating the Fourth Amendment by breaking into people’s homes without good reason, but for doing what they do best: violating the trust of the people who were gullible enough to think that government was there to help out of some humanitarian motive.

We know that government can’t do anything as well as people acting voluntarily, and everyone in Cedar Rapids should now know what Hurricane Katrina victims know: ordinary people are much better than government employees at emergency response, and if government responds, things will go wrong.

And next to suffer from government incompetence and tyranny is downstate Illinois and Missouri, where the Mississippi River is now rising and threatening to reach levels not seen since the flood of 1993. More tyranny is sure to come.

The Department of Homeland Security has granted an extension to New Hampshire for compliance with the provisions of the federal REAL ID program.

New Hampshire law prohibits the state Department of Safety from participating in the REAL ID program, and on Wednesday assistant commissioner Earl Sweeney sent a letter (PDF) to DHS requesting that DHS not “take steps that would penalize the ability of New Hampshire residents to use their valid and very secure New Hampshire driver licenses and non-driver’s ID cards for federal identification purposes and commercial air travel.”

In the letter, Sweeney outlined several steps New Hampshire has taken to make its licenses more secure, including a unique New Hampshire laminate, the birth month and year hidden in the Old Man of the Mountain logo, microprinting and ultraviolet printing, and other features, as well as process changes. “We will also have a central print farm for the production of driver licenses and non-driver’s ID cards,” Sweeney wrote in the letter.

In addition, Sweeney noted that the state legislature could not revisit the issue of REAL ID until 2009.

The request was apparently good enough for DHS, which responded by granting the state an extension until December 31, 2009, “to meet the requirements of REAL ID,” according to DHS assistant secretary for policy Stewart Baker, who wrote his response (PDF) the next day.

Baker wrote that New Hampshire’s security measures “will provide the principal security features required at this time by Real ID.”

The extension means that New Hampshire residents will be allowed to use their IDs for federal purposes, such as entering federal buildings and boarding aircraft without undergoing special security screening, until 2010.

DHS also granted an extension to Montana, whose governor recently told DHS to “go to hell,” leaving Maine and South Carolina the only states which have not been pronounced compliant or granted extensions.

“And,” as Wired reporter Ryan Singel writes, “the states get to claim victory over the federal bullies.

“And it leaves time for Congress to step in, if it wishes, to actually hold hearings on identification policy and figure out if a de facto national ID, complete with a national biometric database, is really the right solution to preventing someone from blowing up a mall full of shoppers.”

New York State will begin issuing new versions of so-called secure driver licenses as well as a version specifically for undocumented immigrants, Gov. Eliot Spitzer said last weekend.

New York joins three other states which have announced plans to comply with the requirements of the REAL ID Act of 2005, which allows the Department of Homeland Security to set standards for state driver licenses and identification cards, or the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, which requires everyone to present a passport or approved alternative document when crossing the U.S. border.

One license for New Yorkers would incorporate “facial recognition technology, central issuance procedures, and advanced document verification systems,” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said at a joint press conference with Spitzer.

The second would also incorporate additional security features, such as RFID technology, to comply with requirements for the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative and allow holders to use it instead of a passport to cross the Canadian border.

The third version of the license, to be provided to undocumented immigrants, would be marked as not valid for federal identification.

“Besides being a massive defeat for the governor, I can’t imagine many — if any — illegal immigrants coming forward to get the driver’s licenses, because they’d basically be labeled as illegal,” said New York Rep. Peter King, the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee.

New York has between 500,000 and 1 million undocumented immigrants, many of whom are driving without a license and car insurance or with fake driver’s licenses, Spitzer said in September when he announced his executive order. — Associated Press

It’s a brilliant move for those concerned with illegal immigration: Such people either get the license and have their addresses on file so the government can easily round them up at their convenience, or they don’t get the license and sooner or later get arrested for not having one.

The federal government has not finalized the standards for REAL ID compliant licenses, but is said to be two to three months away. DHS issued draft regulations in March, and Chertoff has said he will push forward with REAL ID despite widespread opposition.

And for you Americans, your turn to be rounded up comes later.

Here at Homeland Stupidity, no government cow is sacred. Waste, fraud, abuse, plain incompetence, and bad policy are all fair game. As a result, government officials in the higher pay grades tend to be displeased with what they read here. As a general rule, the higher the pay grade, the more displeased.

Therefore, I was not at all surprised to hear that high-ranking officials in the U.S. Marshals Service were upset with Sunday’s published story regarding their Office of Protective Intelligence. I was, however, surprised to spot two surveillance teams while going about my business Tuesday night.

Before I get into that, though, I want to make a clarification regarding the Department of Justice inspector general’s report (PDF) on the OPI which was published last Wednesday. The report does state that “USMS’s efforts to improve its capabilities to assess reported threats and identify potential threats languished” between 2004 and early 2007, with a significant backlog of reported threats to be assessed in 2006. In fairness to the rank and file, the report also states that they cleared the backlogs and that OPI is revising its threat assessment process to be faster and more efficient. Those changes are set to take place this month.

However, the report also notes that there is no formal process in place “to develop protective intelligence that identifies potential threats against the judiciary. . . . USMS was slow to staff the protective intelligence function and has not developed a strategy to effectively collect, analyze, and share information.” This means that USMS’s ability to identify previously unknown threats is limited. Since, as the report acknowledges, less than 10 percent of individuals who “attacked or approached to attack a prominent public figure” communicated a threat beforehand, developing this capability is critical to providing effective protection.

As you’ll recall, an OPI inspector is here in New Hampshire attempting to assess Manchester resident Rob Jacobs. That is, of course, after he assessed several completely unrelated people who just happen to be Free State Project members. Jacobs and the inspector have yet to meet in person, as they have been unable to agree on a meeting place. After marshals failed to meet with him on Saturday, Jacobs attempted to set up a second meeting for Tuesday evening, which the inspector declined to attend. He apparently objected to the venue, Murphy’s Taproom, a local restaurant where Free State Project members regularly meet.

Tuesday evening at Murphy’s Taproom, instead of the inspector, several of us spoke to a local reporter, who wrote a more neutral story than this one.

Jacobs said he supports the Browns’ cause and has visited their home many times in the past year. He said he has never seen Ed Brown’s supposed hit list and said he does not know anyone who might be planning to harm government officials. . . .

Keith Murphy, owner of Murphy’s Tap Room and a member of the Free State Project, said many Free Staters who already have come to New Hampshire supported the Browns’ crusade against the federal income tax. They were turned off, however, as Ed Brown’s rhetoric became increasingly violent and after he told reporters all of the world’s problems are the fault of Freemasons and Jews.

“We are ’small L’ Libertarians,” Murphy said of the Free Staters. “We believe violence is inherently wrong. It’s not in our nature.” — Manchester Union Leader

We certainly need to do away with the whole sorry system of income taxation. Just throw Title 26 out. (And a few billion useless pork-barrel government programs along with it.) But doing violence to government officials won’t get rid of the income tax, and it will result in crackdowns the likes of which we haven’t seen in this country in recent memory, or perhaps ever.

Interestingly, those same high-ranking government officials are upset at the level of publicity this story has been getting in general, and especially with the publication of videos documenting the experiences of the people here who feel they were harassed and threatened by the marshals and “Treasury agents.” It’s been my experience that, for the most part, it’s the bad apples in government who object to having their actions publicized.

And perhaps the surveillance teams at Murphy’s got wind of some of this. Among the people they got to see while the Republican debate played on the TV screens were a state representative, an off-duty police officer planning a run for state representative next year, two local candidates for alderman in two different wards in the city, several individuals starting a newspaper, local Republican and Democratic party officials, and a couple dozen quite ordinary people who are sick and tired of big government spending their children into debt and invading their private lives at every turn.

Ideas, they say, are bulletproof. And the idea of freedom, to be left alone when you’ve harmed nobody and to have no more government than is necessary to protect your right to be left alone when you’ve harmed nobody, has persisted throughout human history. The income tax flies in the face of everything we understand about what it means to be free. It is indeed a form of slavery, involuntary servitude of the worst kind: the fruits of your labor are not only taken by force, they are taken by a group of strangers you have no effective way to reason or plead with. It will eventually be swept into the dustbin of history along with many other methods of tyranny which have preceded it.

But the battle is for the hearts and minds of those enslaved by it, many of whom don’t even know they are enslaved, and whom along with us would be freed. It is a battle of ideas. Bullets have no place here. It is the state which uses bullets and other means of violence to enforce its tyranny over the people. This is why freedom will ultimately prevail: the state’s bad ideas and their bad actions cannot stand in the harsh light of day.

A Justice Department audit of the government’s master list of known and suspected terrorists found errors and inconsistencies which would have allowed terrorists to enter the country undetected and would mistakenly identify innocent Americans as terrorists.

The Terrorist Screening Database, maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, contains over 700,000 records (and growing fast) submitted by the FBI, CIA and other intelligence agencies, and exports its data to other government databases, such as those used by the State Department to screen visa applications, and for the Transportation Security Agency’s no-fly and selectee lists.

But according to the audit, (PDF) conducted by inspector general Glenn A. Fine, the database “continues to have significant weaknesses,” he told Congress.

Depending on the requirements of the agency in question, the TSDB exports different sets of names to various government databases. An in-depth audit of one of those, the TSA’s no-fly list, found that the list should be cut in half.

Part of the problem is that the TSDB consists of two distinct databases which are supposed to be synchronized with exactly the same information, in order to facilitate exporting the data to different government agencies, but the auditors found that the two databases did not always remain in sync.

The auditors reviewed the TSC’s quality assurance protocols and found that of 105 records reviewed for quality assurance, 38 percent had errors or inconsistencies that the quality assurance process did not discover.

The audit reviewed complaints, finding that it usually took more than two months to resolve complaints, and that some remained open for more than a year.

In addition, the auditors found that 20 names of known and suspected terrorists were not being exported from the system so that front-line agents with Customs and Border Protection could prevent them from entering the country.

“For technical reasons, about 20 identities or records did not get distributed as completely as they should have,” [TSC director Leonard ] Boyle said in an interview. The CBP can access the crime center data, Boyle said, but the FBI did not send the watch list data directly to CBP systems “as they should have been.” — Associated Press

Finally, the audit found 2,682 records which were not being exported to any other database, and after reviewing them, found that 2,118 of them did not belong on any government watch list at all and should be removed.

“The new report confirms a widespread impression that the watch-list system still needs work,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy. “Not only are too many innocent people being listed in error, some of the bad guys are not properly included.” — Washington Post

And the problems just go on and on.

Additional problems with the TSC’s technology that the auditors identified included:

• Cumbersome FBI data handling practices that create unnecessary errors, anomalies and inconsistencies in the records;
• The FBI practice of entering data about suspected terrorists into a downstream database, which prevents other agencies from reviewing the bureau’s data;
• Needless delays in entering data into the terrorist watch list, which cause a significant vulnerability to the integrity of the consolidated database;
• Duplicate information problems with 6,262 records in the TSDB;
• Delays in resolving data quality assurance problems that ranged up to 329 days, with an average processing time of 80 days (as of February 2007, TSC officials were working with 3,000 open quality assurance problems); and
• Delays and inefficiencies in handling requests by specific people for correction or deletion of their watch list records.

— Government Computer News

Don’t you just love how the government has turned a simple idea, maintaining a watchlist of known and suspected terrorists, and made a complete bureaucratic nightmare out of it? Do you feel safer now?

“Inaccurate, incomplete and obsolete watchlist information can increase the risk of not identifying known or suspected terrorists,” Fine said, “and it can also increase the risk that innocent persons will be stopped or detained.”

And if you’re one of those innocent Americans mistakenly watchlisted, good luck getting off the list. It gets checked by every police officer who asks you for your driver license. The next time you’re stopped for speeding, and the next thing you know your car is surrounded by cops pointing guns at you for no good reason, now you know who to blame.