Entries Tagged "laws"

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The Limits of Identity Cards

Good legal paper on the limits of identity cards: Stephen Mason and Nick Bohm, “Identity and its Verification,” in Computer Law & Security Review, Volume 26, Number 1, Jan 2010.

Those faced with the problem of how to verify a person’s identity would be well advised to ask themselves the question, ‘Identity with what?’ An enquirer equipped with the answer to this question is in a position to tackle, on a rational basis, the task of deciding what evidence will be useful for the purpose. Without the answer to the question, the verification of identity becomes a sadly familiar exercise in blind compliance with arbitrary rules.

Posted on March 10, 2010 at 7:09 AM • View Comments

All Subversive Organizations Now Must Register in South Carolina

This appears not to be a joke:

The state’s “Subversive Activities Registration Act,” passed last year and now officially on the books, states that “every member of a subversive organization, or an organization subject to foreign control, every foreign agent and every person who advocates, teaches, advises or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States … shall register with the Secretary of State.”

There’s even a $5 filing fee.

By “subversive organization,” the law means “every corporation, society, association, camp, group, bund, political party, assembly, body or organization, composed of two or more persons, which directly or indirectly advocates, advises, teaches or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States [or] of this State.”

Wow, is that idiotic or what?

Here’s the form.

Does the Republican Party count as an organization that “directly … advocates … controlling … the government”? I think it does. I think all political parties count under that definition.

How about we all fill in a copy and send it to them.

EDITED TO ADD (2/9): I misquoted the statute: “(1) ‘Subversive organization’ means every corporation, society, association, camp, group, bund, political party, assembly, body or organization, composed of two or more persons, which directly or indirectly advocates, advises, teaches or practices the duty, necessity or propriety of controlling, conducting, seizing or overthrowing the government of the United States, of this State or of any political subdivision thereof by force or violence or other unlawful means;”

It’s the last clause that rules out most of us.

EDITED TO ADD (2/11): And it seems that this is from the McCarthy era: 1951.

Posted on February 9, 2010 at 12:09 PM • View Comments

Scaring the Senate Intelligence Committee

This is unconscionable:

At Tuesday’s hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked Mr. Blair [the Director of National Intelligence] to assess the possibility of an attempted attack in the United States in the next three to six months.

He replied, “The priority is certain, I would say”—a response that was reaffirmed by the top officials of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.

I don’t know what “the priority is certain” actually means, but now everyone is reporting that these agencies claim there will be a terrorist attack in the U.S. during the next six months.

Posted on February 5, 2010 at 11:59 AM • View Comments

Online Credit/Debit Card Security Failure

Ross Anderson reports:

Online transactions with credit cards or debit cards are increasingly verified using the 3D Secure system, which is branded as “Verified by VISA” and “MasterCard SecureCode”. This is now the most widely-used single sign-on scheme ever, with over 200 million cardholders registered. It’s getting hard to shop online without being forced to use it.

In a paper I’m presenting today at Financial Cryptography, Steven Murdoch and I analyse 3D Secure. From the engineering point of view, it does just about everything wrong, and it’s becoming a fat target for phishing. So why did it succeed in the marketplace?

Quite simply, it has strong incentives for adoption. Merchants who use it push liability for fraud back to banks, who in turn push it on to cardholders. Properly designed single sign-on systems, like OpenID and InfoCard, can’t offer anything like this. So this is yet another case where security economics trumps security engineering, but in a predatory way that leaves cardholders less secure. We conclude with a suggestion on what bank regulators might do to fix the problem.

Posted on February 1, 2010 at 6:26 AM • View Comments

Decertifying "Terrorist" Pilots

This article reads like something written by the company’s PR team.

When it comes to sleuthing these days, knowing your way within a database is as valued a skill as the classic, Sherlock Holmes-styled powers of detection.

Safe Banking Systems Software proved this very point in a demonstration of its algorithm acumen—one that resulted in a disclosure that convicted terrorists actually maintained working licenses with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

The algorithm seems to be little more than matching up names and other basic info:

It used its algorithm-detection software to sift out uncommon names such as Abdelbaset Ali Elmegrahi, aka the Lockerbie bomber. It found that a number of licensed airmen all had the same P.O. box as their listed address—one that happened to be in Tripoli, Libya. These men all had working FAA certificates. And while the FAA database information investigated didn’t contain date-of-birth information, Safe Banking was able to use content on the FAA Website to determine these key details as well, to further gain a positive and clear identification of the men in question.

In any case, they found these three people with pilot’s licenses:

Elmegrahi, who had been posted on the FBI Most Wanted list for a decade and was convicted of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103, killing 259 people in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Elmegrahi was an FAA-certified aircraft dispatcher.

Re Tabib, a California resident who was convicted in 2007 for illegally exporting U.S. military aircraft parts—specifically export maintenance kits for F-14 fighter jets—to Iran. Tabib received three FAA licenses after his conviction, qualifying to be a flight instructor, ground instructor and transport pilot.

Myron Tereshchuk, who pleaded guilty to possession of a biological weapon after the FBI caught him with a brew of ricin, explosive powder and other essentials in Maryland in 2004. Tereshchuk was a licensed mechanic and student pilot.

And the article concludes with:

Suffice to say, after the FAA was made aware of these criminal histories, all three men have since been decertified.

Although I’m all for annoying international arms dealers, does anyone know the procedures for FAA decertification? Did the FAA have the legal right to do this, after being “made aware” of some information by a third party?

Of course, they don’t talk about all the false positives their system also found. How many innocents were also decertified? And they don’t mention the fact that, in the 9/11 attacks, FAA certification wasn’t really an issue. “Excuse me, young man. You can’t hijack and fly this aircraft. It says right here that the FAA decertified you.”

Posted on November 23, 2009 at 2:36 PM • View Comments

FBI/CIA/NSA Information Sharing Before 9/11

It’s conventional wisdom that the legal “wall” between intelligence and law enforcement was one of the reasons we failed to prevent 9/11. The 9/11 Comission evaluated that claim, and published a classified report in 2004. The report was released, with a few redactions, over the summer: “Legal Barriers to Information Sharing: The Erection of a Wall Between Intelligence and Law Enforcement Investigations,” 9/11 Commission Staff Monograph by Barbara A. Grewe, Senior Counsel for Special Projects, August 20, 2004.

The report concludes otherwise:

“The information sharing failures in the summer of 2001 were not the result of legal barriers but of the failure of individuals to understand that the barriers did not apply to the facts at hand,” the 35-page monograph concludes. “Simply put, there was no legal reason why the information could not have been shared.”

The prevailing confusion was exacerbated by numerous complicating circumstances, the monograph explains. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was growing impatient with the FBI because of repeated errors in applications for surveillance. Justice Department officials were uncomfortable requesting intelligence surveillance of persons and facilities related to Osama bin Laden since there was already a criminal investigation against bin Laden underway, which normally would have preempted FISA surveillance. Officials were reluctant to turn to the FISA Court of Review for clarification of their concerns since one of the judges on the court had expressed doubts about the constitutionality of FISA in the first place. And so on. Although not mentioned in the monograph, it probably didn’t help that public interest critics in the 1990s (myself included) were accusing the FISA Court of serving as a “rubber stamp” and indiscriminately approving requests for intelligence surveillance.

In the end, the monograph implicitly suggests that if the law was not the problem, then changing the law may not be the solution.

James Bamford comes to much the same conclusion in his book, The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America: there was no legal wall that prevented intelligence and law enforcement from sharing the information necessary to prevent 9/11; it was inter-agency rivalries and turf battles.

Posted on November 12, 2009 at 2:26 PM • View Comments

The Problem of Vague Laws

The average American commits three felonies a day: the title of a new book by Harvey Silverglate. More specifically, the problem is the intersection of vague laws and fast-moving technology:

Technology moves so quickly we can barely keep up, and our legal system moves so slowly it can’t keep up with itself. By design, the law is built up over time by court decisions, statutes and regulations. Sometimes even criminal laws are left vague, to be defined case by case. Technology exacerbates the problem of laws so open and vague that they are hard to abide by, to the point that we have all become potential criminals.

Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate calls his new book “Three Felonies a Day,” referring to the number of crimes he estimates the average American now unwittingly commits because of vague laws. New technology adds its own complexity, making innocent activity potentially criminal.

[…]

In 2001, a man named Bradford Councilman was charged in Massachusetts with violating the wiretap laws. He worked at a company that offered an online book-listing service and also acted as an Internet service provider to book dealers. As an ISP, the company routinely intercepted and copied emails as part of the process of shuttling them through the Web to recipients.

The federal wiretap laws, Mr. Silverglate writes, were “written before the dawn of the Internet, often amended, not always clear, and frequently lagging behind the whipcrack speed of technological change.” Prosecutors chose to interpret the ISP role of momentarily copying messages as they made their way through the system as akin to impermissibly listening in on communications. The case went through several rounds of litigation, with no judge making the obvious point that this is how ISPs operate. After six years, a jury found Mr. Councilman not guilty.

Other misunderstandings of the Web criminalize the exercise of First Amendment rights. A Saudi student in Idaho was charged in 2003 with offering “material support” to terrorists. He had operated Web sites for a Muslim charity that focused on normal religious training, but was prosecuted on the theory that if a user followed enough links off his site, he would find violent, anti-American comments on other sites. The Internet is a series of links, so if there’s liability for anything in an online chain, it would be hard to avoid prosecution.

EDITED TO ADD (10/12): Audio interview with Harvey Silvergate.

Posted on September 29, 2009 at 1:08 PM • View Comments

The "Hidden Cost" of Privacy

Forbes ran an article talking about the “hidden” cost of privacy. Basically, the point was that privacy regulations are expensive to comply with, and a lot of that expense gets eaten up by the mechanisms of compliance and doesn’t go toward improving anyone’s actual privacy. This is a valid point, and one that I make in talks about privacy all the time. It’s particularly bad in the United States, because we have a patchwork of different privacy laws covering different types of information and different situations and not a single comprehensive privacy law.

The meta-problem is simple to describe: those entrusted with our privacy often don’t have much incentive to respect it. Examples include: credit bureaus such as TransUnion and Experian, who don’t have any business relationship at all with the people whose data they collect and sell; companies such as Google who give away services—and collect personal data as a part of that—as an incentive to view ads, and make money by selling those ads to other companies; medical insurance companies, who are chosen by a person’s employer; and computer software vendors, who can have monopoly powers over the market. Even worse, it can be impossible to connect an effect of a privacy violation with the violation itself—if someone opens a bank account in your name, how do you know who was to blame for the privacy violation?—so even when there is a business relationship, there’s no clear cause-and-effect relationship.

What this all means is that protecting individual privacy remains an externality for many companies, and that basic market dynamics won’t work to solve the problem. Because the efficient market solution won’t work, we’re left with inefficient regulatory solutions. So now the question becomes: how do we make regulation as efficient as possible? I have some suggestions:

  1. Broad privacy regulations are better than narrow ones.
  2. Simple and clear regulations are better than complex and confusing ones.
  3. It’s far better to regulate results than methodology.
  4. Penalties for bad behavior need to be expensive enough to make good behavior the rational choice.

We’ll never get rid of the inefficiencies of regulation—that’s the nature of the beast, and why regulation only makes sense when the market fails—but we can reduce them.

Posted on June 15, 2009 at 6:45 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.