Well... that's not how this is supposed to work

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They're trying to get even more power and less oversight? And I thought this Mike guy was doing such a good job so far. Here's one that caught my eye:

Give telecommunications companies immunity from civil liability for their cooperation with Bush's terrorist surveillance program. Pending lawsuits against companies including Verizon and AT&T allege they violated privacy laws by giving phone records to the NSA for the program.

Golly. I wonder if posting private information online could be a problem

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This lady found Social Security Numbers on a state website. She's threatened to publicly release detailed instructions on how to find them like she did and to expose the SSNs of several important people in the state if they don't fix the problem.

A spokesman for the office responsible said:

The bulk of the "hundreds of thousands" of documents on the Web site are business filings, and only 5 percent or so are believed to include Social Security numbers

Why can't states realize that putting records online makes them available to the world instead of just local people? There's public information and global public information.

That aside, this lady is my hero and I hope she does post the data. I've often wondered how long it would take to solve some of our privacy woes if a few dozen members of congress had all their personal data posted on a website.

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You may recall that Maryland was considering passing some laws requiring paper voting. According to the TrueVoteMD newsletter:

In the closing hours of the 2007 legislative session, a four-year effort to require paper ballots for Maryland's voting system passed the House and the Senate unanimously. ... The final bill ensures that any new voting system certified for use must include a voter verified paper ballot. The bill requires an optically scan-able paper ballot marked by hand or with the help of a ballot-marking device.

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It looks like the ball is starting to roll.

New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Arkansas have joined the list of states evaluating proposals to ban implementation of the controversial Real ID act.

Federal Trade Commission - Forgot their job apparently

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On May 10th, 2006, President Bush signed an executive order to create an Identity Theft Task force in order to identify concrete steps to reducing the identity theft problem.

On Dec 26th, 2006, the task force put out a public call for comments to "improve the effectiveness and efficiency of federal government efforts to reduce identity theft".

Of course, I submitted details about implementing Credit Freezes and halting data abuse

There were off to a good start when the interim results of the task force included language about Credit Freezes:

For residents of states in which state law authorizes a credit freeze, consider placing a credit freeze on their credit file. This option is most useful when the breach includes information that can be used to open a new account, such as SSNs. A credit freeze cuts off third party access to a consumer’s credit report, thereby effectively preventing the issuance of new credit in the consumer’s name.

But problems started when the press release mysteriously omitted the information. They'd already failed to include it in their consumer education initiative though they're happy to recommend Fraud alerts or Credit monitoring for FREE! Well, whee! That's just great. Thanks for paying for my worthless monitoring service which will tell me in horrific real time that I'm being ripped off rather than actually do anything to stop it.

Failing to include credit freeze information was nothing short of incompetence.

Sadly, on release of the final recommendations some time later, freezes were only barely mentioned and even then, discouraged. This is hardly the first time I've seen government incompetence up close, but considering the importance of the issue, it was still discouraging. Bottom line, the FTC and in particular Ms. Bourne Farrell and Alberto Gonzales failed the President and the citizens they are supposed to serve.

George W. Bush

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Showing his usually disregard for Congress, the American people, and rules, Bush named an ambassador in a way that circumvented Congressional oversight.

The appointment, made while lawmakers were out of town on spring break, prompted angry rebukes from Democrats, who said Bush's action may even be illegal.

George W. Bush

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The "War on Terror" is political spin initiated by President Bush to justify using "wartime" powers indefinitely. Just like the "War on Drugs", the war on terror will never end.

Nobody disagrees to giving a little leeway to our commander in chief during a clear and present need, but that's the point: a war on terror that lasts an indefinite amount of time is neither clear, nor present.

It's about danged time that someone in a high position finally dropped this marketing ploy where it belongs.

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So they're finally going to try and do something about the e-voting disaster.

HR 811 features several requirements that will warm the hearts of geek activists. It bans the use of computerized voting machines that lack a voter-verified paper trail. It mandates that the paper records be the authoritative source in any recounts, and requires prominent notices reminding voters to double-check the paper record before leaving the polling place. It mandates automatic audits of at least three percent of all votes cast to detect discrepancies between the paper and electronic records. It bans voting machines that contain wireless networking hardware and prohibits connecting voting machines to the Internet. Finally, it requires that the source code for e-voting machines be made publicly available.

There's not one thing in there that's wrong! If they actually implemented all those provisions, e-voting might actually work!

The proposal wasn't without its detractors, however. Several state election officials testified about the practical challenges of implementing the new requirements. Chris Nelson, South Dakota's secretary of state, warned that many of the requirements in the legislation would conflict with the states' own election procedures.

Cry me a river. "Oh it's too HARD to implement security! We need to have less restrictions so we can do this cheaper!"

The law allows flexibility in how some of the auditing is done as long as it's NIST approved and the states always have the option of keeping the optical current methods if they decide that the regulations for e-voting are too strict or too expensive to implement at this time.

Of course, this almost sounds too good to be true. I'll have to read the law later, but I'm betting it has some terrible hidden catch like it legalizes eating little puppies or provides millions of pork dollars for human RFID implantations.

Update: It looks like the guys over at Slashdot feel the same way I do.

In more good news, the RIAA has been thwarted in their attempts to seize a computer belonging to a relative of one of their lawsuit victims.