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April 10, 2003
Privacy Legislation
I attended a lecture today by Ari Schwartz, a Associate Director for the Center for Democracy and Technology, that covered some of the more recent trends in US government policy towards privacy. Essentially this broke down to a discussion, apparently for informing the non-enlightened masses, on the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Act, and CAPPS II.
First a little bit about Avi. I had a chance to talk with him after the presentation and found him to be really well informed on a broad spectrum of topics. While it is his job to know politics and policy, he was very open about answering questions that were well thought out and those that were poorly planned. He's also a Mac OSX user on an iBook2. He instantly won my appreciation. All told, he seemed to be someone I would enjoy talking with on a more regular basis, with a lot of energy towards his job.
The lecture only lasted an hour, not nearly enough time to properly cover completely any one piece of legislation listed above, so many details were glossed over in favor of the more striking points. One of the more important points revolved around the Patriot Act and the sunset time on this abomination of civil rights and privacy. The New York Times has an article (free registration yadda yadda... or read the SFGate's version) about how some Republicans in power wish to extend the sunset date beyond the 2005 deadline. Ari pointed out that many of the powers granted in this legislation have been desired for a long time by law enforcement officials, and as such it's not surprising to see them fighting to keep these powers.
The part that becomes interesting really is the lack of information being brought forth by the Justice Department. It seems that detailed reports on how law enforcement groups are utilizing these powers are not being shared with outside observers. More importantly, there seems to be an inability to perform any oversight, as the rules and regulations are often decided instantly upon a scenario. Ari used an example of an FBI field agent being told to call headquarters for a decision if such a maneuver would be legal. This provides no real way to watch the watchers as it be.
Ari made an interesting point in regards to the CAPPS II system. I had asked if there was to be any movement towards allowing citizens to clear their name (read this Wired News article for more information). While it would be nice to allow this to happen, Ari points out that this also would allow criminals to enact the same steps. If a citizen can (with enough determination) clear up their name, an organized outfit would easily be able to bypass the system. More importantly it seems that security through obscurity is being kept in this case (not informing anyone on the search algorithms), which is very unlike any other technology in the US (witness wiretapping) government's typical arsenal.
All in all, the lecture was too short as each of these topics could easily take a day to discuss completely. He did open up the lecture by asking how many people read Lessig though. Surprisingly, I think I was the only one to raise a hand at this issue.
Ari did correct me on one major fault thought. It seems that only 10 or 15 calls are really needed to persuade a representative in their thinking. I had always been under the assumption that a few hundred may be necessary. Ari uses a phone call spamming session used recently to back his point. It's late now, I need to sleep. Please excuse the typos found in here, but I needed to put these thoughts together before they all left.
Posted by Dan at April 10, 2003 10:10 PM