Dianne Feinstein is at it again. This time she’s teaming up with Larry Ellison to impose national ID cards on all of us. See:

ID card idea attracts high-level support.

Hey I’ve got an idea: how about we use the ID card system we already have in place! We each already have Social Security numbers, Drivers Licenses, State-issued ID cards and Visas, Passports and Green Cards to identify foreigners.

Implementing a National ID card system is a lose-lose situation for Americans that would drain millions of dollars from our budget without actually providing the American people with any additional protection.

At least Ellison is finally admitting that he’s not really agreeing to donate much of anything. I hope our government doesn’t fall for this shenanigan, or we’ll all pay the price.

Here’s an excerpt from the story mentioned above where Ellison tried to defend himself:

Shalini Chowdhary, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan, said the U.S. government could end up spending more than $3 billion on computer chips, hardware, software and services that go into creating so-called “smart” ID cards.

Ellison said that if he does donate the software, maintenance and upgrades won’t be free.

“I don’t think the government has any trouble paying for the labor associated with the software,” he said. “I made this offer not because the government can’t afford to pay for the software, but because I shut up the critics who were saying, `Gee, Larry Ellison wants to build a national database because he wants to sell more databases,’ which is pretty cynical and bizarre. What’s in it for me is the same thing that’s in it for you: a safer America.”

It’s starting already, the Financial Anti-Terrorism Act sounds like it’s targetting terrorism, but the real targets are Americans. (See Terror Bill Limits Gambling, Too .)

Democrats were similarly split, with ranking member saying that college students must be shielded from gambling’s lure.
“The chief users of Internet gambling are not terrorists, they are our youths,” said Rep. John LaFalce (D-New York). “Lots of different kids are given credit cards — not one — multiple cards. It’s easy to gamble from dormitory rooms, or with wireless connections from campus quads, or with Palm Pilots any place.”

During the 90-minute debate, liberal icon Rep. Barney Frank (D-Massachusetts) sounded almost libertarian. “Too many people who disapprove of gambling want to ban it,” Frank said. “It’s not generally been the policy of the U.S. government to tell people how to spend their money.”

The bill would ban credit card companies from issuing card numbers to be used on gambling websites. Credit card firms and banks would be liable if they have “actual knowledge” that they may be providing services to online casinos, a penalty that some members said went too far.

“The problem with actual knowledge is that a court can assume this,” said Castle, the sponsor of the unsuccessful amendment.

The only committee member who voted against the final bill was Rep. Ron Paul, a libertarian-leaning Republican from Texas.

Paul said the anti-gambling sections were about “whether the government should try and mold behavior. Over centuries governments have tried to do this…. Gambling is entertainment. We should not allow government to regulate entertainment.”

The highly controversial
USA Act passed today by a 96-1 vote. The lone dissenter was Senator
Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin.

Feingold had attempted to
amend
the bill, but unfortunately, he was unsuccessful. (See: A Senator’s Lonely Privacy Fight
.)

Here are a few excerpts from one account — Terror Bill Clears Senate, by Declan McCullagh for Wired News.

During the three-hour debate, the Senate voted to table — effectively killing — Feingold’s amendments, which would have:

• Still allowed police to perform “roving wiretaps” and listen in on any telephone that a subject of an investigation might use. But cops could only eavesdrop when the suspect is the person using the phone. The amendment was rejected, 90-7.

• Preseved the privacy of sensitive records — such as medical or educational data — by requiring police to convince a judge that viewing them is necessary. Without that amendment, the USA Act expands police’s ability to access any type of stored or “tangible” information. The amendment was rejected, 89-8.

• Clarified that universities, libraries and employers may only snoop on people who use their computers in narrow circumstances. Right now, the USA Act says that system administrators should be able to monitor anyone they deem a “computer trespasser.” The amendment was rejected, 83-13.

• Barred police from obtaining a court order, sneaking into a suspect’s home, and not notifiying that person they had been there. The “secret search” section currently is part of the USA Act — and is something the Justice Department has wanted at least since 1999, when they unsuccessfully asked Congress for that power at the time. The amendment was not introduced.

Feingold’s amendments would have rewritten only a tiny portion of the vast, 243-page bill. Even if they had been added, the USA Act still allows police to conduct Internet eavesdropping without a court order in some circumstances, lets federal prosecutors imprison non-citizens for extended periods, and expands the duration of an electronic surveillance order issued by a secret court from 90 to 120 days.

I saw Senator Barbara Boxer on television this morning talking about the Airport Security Bill that has been working its way through Congress. She described two key issues that have been holding things up. Issues that I personally hope she and other members of Congress keep fighting for:

1. “To make sure that those screeners at the airport are really professionals,” and not unqualified people hired quickly and trained poorly in haste.

2. To have extended unemployment benefits for the displaced airline workers. “Since we’ve helped the airlines keep flying, we feel that we should help the airlines people that have been laid off.”

   Boxer is worried that if this issue isn’t dealt with now, it may never be dealt with. That would be bad for the thousands of Americans that have been laid off as a result of this tragedy.

   “We can’t get agreement to do it,” Boxer said. “Sometimes you have to stand up and fight for people that maybe don’t have the same voice as the airline executives.”

She also noted that, presently, the biggest problem is the Fillibustering going on that’s getting in the way of even taking a vote.

Dianne Feinstein thinks our already strained National Guard should be patrolling the highways and bottlenecking imported goods: Feinstein wants security role for
National Guard –
Senator would expand duties far
beyond airport protection.

Feinstein’s proposal, if put into effect, would result
in the largest call- up of the National Guard in more
than 50 years. The last time units were used in such
numbers was during the Korean War, when the
40th Division of the California National Guard was
sent into combat.

“Five million cargo containers entered the United
States last year,” she said, “and only 2 percent were
inspected. We have always put trade ahead of the
security of our nation.”

Hmmm. Seems like a funny time for confessions.

I wonder who the “we” is. I guess the only thing we know for sure is that Dianne was speaking for herself.

This September 14, 2001 letter from Dr. Anthony T. Kern, a retired United States Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and a former Professor in Aviation Studies and Director of Military History at the USAF Academy, courtesty of the Urban Legends Reference Pages: Rumors of War (Colonel of Truth), provides some great insight into the physical and psychological battles we can look forward to in the future if we actually go forward with this thing.

Here’s the introduction a friend of mine received with it: “This was written by my academic advisor at the Academy. He was not only one of the most brilliant men I’ve ever met, but also an individual who combined that brilliance with common sense to lead others. His words are the
ones that haven’t been heard yet but I believe will come to be true before we have the chance to recover from this initial tragedy.”

Hmmm. What would Thoreau think of this National Review online article by Jonah Goldberg about the situation with Politically Incorrect’s Bill Maher.

Kooks and Terrorists, a sample chapter from the O’Reilly book, Database Nation: The Death of Privacy in the 21st Century,
by Simson Garfinkel, provides a very timely backgrounder about how the face of terrorism has changed over the years.

Here’s an excerpt quoting James D. Kallstrom, who was the FBI’s chief of engineering in Quantico, Virginia, before he became director of the FBI’s New York office, before he left the FBI a year later to take a job as a vice president at a major financial institution:

Kallstrom believes that it’s entirely possible that a single terrorist attack will kill more than 10,000 people sometime within the next 30 years. “I am not going to predict it, but I think that it would be naive to say it isn’t possible,” he says. And if it happens, he says, there will be a tremendous backlash on the part of lawmakers and the public to pass draconian laws and institute a virtual police state to make sure that such an attack never happens again.

“Legislators and lawmakers generally don’t react to things without a body count and the prediction of a body count–they don’t want to hear about it. They want to see the body count. It is not good enough to feel the door and feel that it is warm; you have to have smoke coming from under the door. . . . As we move to this new millenium, the risk of this mentality is terrible.” Instead of waiting for the body count and a resulting Congressional attack on civil liberties, says Kallstrom, the United States needs to start preparing now for the unthinkable.

Here’s a sneak preview of science fiction writer Cory Doctorow‘s latest work in progress, Eastern Standard Tribe, courtesy of Mindjack Magazine.

According to this Guardian article by Duncan Cambell (How the plotters slipped US net): “FBI assistant director Ron Dick, head of the
US National Infrastructure Protection Centre, told reporters that the
hijackers had used the net, and ‘used it well’.” (Sure, I get it….The same way that a gang of bank robbers “uses the roads, and uses them well” when they drive off in a getaway car…)

More from the story:

NSA has been attempting to keep up with the internet by building
huge online storage systems to hold and sift email. The first such
system, designed in 1996 and delivered last year, is known as
Sombrero VI. It holds a petabyte of information. A petabyte is a
million gigabytes, and is roughly equivalent to eight times the
information in the Library of Congress. NSA is now implementing a
Petaplex system, at least 20 times larger. It is designed to hold
internet records for up to 90 days.

Dr Gladman and other experts believe that, unless primed by
intelligence from traditional agents, these massive spy libraries are
doomed to fail. The problem with NSA’s purely technological
approach is that it cannot know what it is looking for. While
computers can search for patterns, the problem of correlating
different pieces of information rises exponentially as ever more
communications are intercepted. In short, NSA’s mighty
technology apparatus can easily be rendered blind, as happened
here, if it has nothing to start from.

The new legal plans may therefore do more harm than good.
According to Cambridge computer security specialist Dr Ian Miller,
bringing back escrow “will damage our security in other ways, and
divert an enormous amount of effort that would far better be spent
elsewhere. It won’t inconvenience competent terrorists in the least.

PGP inventor Phil Zimmermann thinks the penalty of politicians
misunderstanding technology will be even more costly. “If we install
blanket surveillance systems, it will mean the terrorists have won.
The terrorists will have cost us our freedom.”