Dick Cheney Orders CIA to not inform Congress?

The news media is reporting a story that former Vice President Dick Cheny ordered the CIA to not inform Congress about a secret, and presumably controversial, program. While there are almost no details about what the program is, there are, nevertheless a few interesting items of note.

First and foremost, constitutionally, outside his personal staff, the vice president of the United States has no authority to order anyone to do anything. That doesn’t stop the president from delegating power to him or anyone else, and if all we are reading about is true, it demonstrates the enormous amount of trust President Bush placed in Mr. Cheney, and the disdain Mr. Cheney had for the democratic process, and for Congress. Perhaps he would say that he was protecting America’s security by withholding such information, but in the end we have to ask what sort of a government we had that he could do this and get away with it.

Supposedly, the program in question has to do with some form of surveillance. When the Director of CIA discovered the program, he reportedly terminated it immediately and reported its existence to Congress. Any such breathtaking speed within the halls of government indicates that someone didn’t want to be stained with illegal activity. And hence this calls for an immediate investigation of what the program was, who had the authority to authorize it, and if it was illegal, who had the responsibility to stop it.

And if the program was illegal, someone must go to jail, preferably multiple someones, both from the civil and appointed/elected ranks. This is important so that civil service employees can’t simply say that they were following orders, and so that current and future politicos know that they cannot get away with violating peoples’ civil rights, and that their day to face justice will come.

New Research: Social Security Numbers (SSN) are Entirely Predictable

Cybercrime New research published in yesterday’s Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences has dramatic implications for Americans and identity theft. Alessandro Acquisti is an Associate Professor of Information Technology and Public Policy at Heinz College of Carnegie Mellon. He has spent the better part of two years with his colleague Ralph Gross, looking at social security numbers as both identifier and authenticator, something we have all known was a bad combination. Professor Acquisti demonstrates just how bad of an idea it has been in the last twenty years. In that time there have been two significant policy changes that have made numbers extremely predictable based on two pieces of information:

birth city
date of birth

The policy changes involve release of something known as the Death Master File (DMF), which was intended to prevent someone from expropriating a dead person’s identity, and the Enumeration at Birth (EAB) initiative, which has had the effect of allocating SSNs shortly after birth. These combined with the facts that SSNs have structure based on location, and that the less significant components are serialized in allocation, and it makes for a predictable SSN.

This gets worse. While it may be possible to fix this problem for future generations that use SSNs, either by randomizing all or lesser components, or by not filing applications upon birth, the millions of people who have assignments in this time period are in an extremely difficult spot, because the workaround is a change of number. This argues for a new form of identity that separates authentication and identity, but the effort to do so requires that the finance, education, and medical sectors (not to mention government) change their means of identifying individuals. This will be no easy task.

This research is a remarkable piece of work by Professor Acquisti and his colleagues.

The Court Gets it Right!

Scales of Justice It’s so often that we see dismal decisions out of the Supreme Court that perhaps we should go to some additional effort to highlight good ones. On June 25th, the Court announced its decision in Melendez-Diaz v. Massachusetts (No. 07-591). In this case, the defendant was accused of possession of cocaine, and what was entered into evidence was a certificate from a laboratory indicating what the substance was. Under the Sixth Amendment of the Constitution, a defendant has the right to confront his or her accusers, something that is difficult when all that is presented is a certificate. Had the decision gone the other way, the state would in essence be able to write a note, excusing crucial experts from adversarial challenge, while yet admitting their evidence. And it’s not as if we haven’t seen shoddy work by laboratories in the past. While there are exceptions to the so-called Confrontation Clause do exist, they are limited to certain business records, and the unavailability of a material witness (e.g., a decedent in a murder trial).

The funny thing is that in the states I’ve lived, anyone with a speeding ticket has had the right to question the guy who’s pulled him over, and that was for an infraction, and not a felony. I even know of people who have introduced evidence that challenged the validity of radar.

This also goes to our previous discussion about technology changing how the law is applied. Today we have DNA tests that provide a relatively reliably test that when found indicate a person’s presence – by today’s standards. Tomorrow’s approaches may once again upset the apple cart, but only if experts and methods can be challenged with those newer methods.

The TSA is Still At It.

court A recent article in the Wall Street Journal brings to light continuing abuses by the Transport Security Agency of people’s freedoms. In the article several cases are depicted in which the TSA expanded their role from protecting against terrorism on planes to general law enforcement. Here’s the issue: the only reasons the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution allows anyone to screen at all in advance are that the screening is not viewed as a law enforcement activity, and that it is impossible to undo a successful attack. The principle, then, should be that TSA should be required to invade our privacy to the minimum extent possible to protect against such attacks, so that we can continue to enjoy what little we have left of our rights to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. The courts have held as such repeatedly, and it is the same logic used to uphold drunk driving checks.

Technology actually hurts and helps. For instance, new scanners make it possible to see through clothing and detect all manner of substances. On the other hand, because they can do so, there should be less need to open containers if those scanners have said that they are safe. Similarly, technology can improve the way we identify individuals. By doing so, quizzing people about their identity should become less necessary. Just to be clear, I do not view anything having to do with RFID in such a vein. We’ll discuss this more soon.

Happy (forthcoming) 4th of July

American Flag & The Washington Monument Since America is celebrating her birthday a day early, let’s do the same. Happy 233rd birthday, America! You’re this many fingers old. But a mere twenty-one months earlier, even George Washington didn’t think much about the idea of seceding from Britain. In a letter to British Captain Robert Mackenzie he wrote on October 9, 1774 of independence:

“…that no such thing is desired by any thinking man in North America; on the contrary, that it is the ardent wish of the warmest advocates for liberty, that peace and tranquility, upon constitutional grounds, may be restored, and the horrors of civil discord prevented…”

It’s not that Washington was content with the way things were, but the differences had not yet risen to the point where he felt they were irreconcilable. The Powell doctrine didn’t exist back then. The founders entered into a war not knowing whether they could win it. England’s soldiers were far from home, however, and France was looking for new ways to stick a finger in the King’s eye. Perhaps fortune and geography favored the foolish, and yet here we are. Why did they fight? Perhaps they felt it was simply the right thing to do.

It is often said that America’s revolution was one of ideas and not merely one of force. Those ideas had strong ideological grounding from the likes of John Locke, upon whom Jefferson based the preface of the Declaration of Independence. It was he who wrote that man was entitled to life, liberty, and property.

The real revolution did not end in 1781, however. It continues today as our country struggles through recession. Back then, the idea that we could ruin the entire world through global warming or nuclear war would have been considered laughable, and yet today it is understood by all but the most foolish. Back then black men counted as property, as did women and children. Today a black man is president, and America’s voice to the rest of the world is a woman.

Perhaps the next revolution lies in the orthodoxy of economics; the idea that production can sustain us. If production sustains us at the cost of the environment, it does so at the cost of our children. How we value the earth and future generations is something our current model does so poorly, that to this day coal production destroys land and pollutes the air.

Perhaps the next revolution will be how we as a world community live together. Although Roosevelt and Truman worked to form the United Nations in 1945, the institution has done a poor job at preventing wanton attacks on civilians, despotism, and adventurism.

Perhaps the next revolution is yet within America, on how we govern ourselves. As I look at the fiasco that faces the people of California I wonder what it will take to undo the tyranny of the minority of people who are unable to cope with the simple notion that you get what you pay for. If government requires the consent of the governed, which is really what King George III lost, doesn’t it also require at least some amount of common ground? Where is that common ground today? This is not just a challenge for politicians. Californians themselves must agree on what is important to fund and what is not.

So Happy Birthday America! Now let’s get back to work.