Monthly Archives: March 2013

Senators Reject Biometric Worker ID Card

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

The NYT reports that Senators trying to hash out a bipartisan immigration bill have rejected using biometric ID cards to identify legal workers:

The bipartisan group of eight senators is also still debating how to improve E-Verify, the system that employers use to check the immigration status of their workers. A high-tech, biometric identification card was deemed too costly; instead, the group is considering an enhanced E-Verify system that would allow employers to use photographs to identify job applicants and would let workers provide answers to security questions to help prove their legal work status.

I’d like to think that the report Jonathan Weinberg and I wrote last year, Hard to BELIEVE: The High Cost of a Biometric Identity Card (Feb. 2012), published by the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law & Social Policy at UC Berkeley School of Law, had something to do with this.

Posted in ID Cards and Identification | Comments Off on Senators Reject Biometric Worker ID Card

Will FL-27 Flip to Democratic?

Posted on March 18, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

Renters make good Democrats, and other demographic observations suggests that FL-27, the congressional district I live in (it used to be numbered FL-25), is one of the ripest districts demographically for an R-to-D switch.

I agree about the demographics: this is a district whose economic needs and other interests are very badly served by the Republican party. Sooner or later demographics will tell. There are, however, three reasons why despite voting regularly against her district’s economic interests incumbent Ilena Ros-Lehtinen has one of the safest seats in the country: (1) Castro; (2) Personal popularity; (3) Huge campaign warchest.

Take away any two of those, and there’s a good chance the district will flip. In particular, if and when IRL retires, it will be a very winnable Democratic seat — especially if the current Cuban government has collapsed by then. (Sooner or later the current Cuban government will run out of foreign benefactors.) On the other hand, Ros-Lehtinen is only in her early sixties, so she is still in only in the middle age band of our surprisingly elderly Congress. Meanwhile, however, IRL will continue to vote against her constituents’ interests on just about every issue except gay rights, an issue on which she has a progressive record.

Posted in Politics: FL-25/FL-27 | Comments Off on Will FL-27 Flip to Democratic?

Social Consequences of Autonomous Vehicles

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

Lots of food for thought in Deven Desai’s Autonomous Vehicles: Unintended Upsides and Changes. In just a few paragraphs he suggests that self-driving cars could change policing, insurance, local government revenue and even parenting.

Posted in Robots | 1 Comment

Special Feed for Coral Gables-Related Posts

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

If all you are interested in is my Coral Gables-related posts, I have a special RSS feed just for you: Discourse.net RSS feed for Coral Gables-related posts only. Of course, I’d rather if you came by and sampled the whole thing, but I understand that some readers are only interested in the (very erratic) local political coverage.

Similarly, if you don’t use an RSS reader, you can bookmark my Coral Gables archive page which, despite the name, will always have the latest Coral Gables-related post at the top.

(Unfortunately for those out of town I don’t know how to make a feed with everything except the local stuff. Sorry about that. The election is soon, so just bear with me.)

For those who came in late, here are the main posts so far

Posted in Discourse.net, Florida | Comments Off on Special Feed for Coral Gables-Related Posts

Spanish Attack Mailer Aimed at Jim Cason

Posted on March 16, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

Some Coral Gables residents are getting a Spanish alternative to the English-language attack ad aimed at Mayor Jim Cason. It’s clearly a targeted mailing as I did not get one.

I think this one is perhaps going to be slightly more effective than the English one:

The main message is more streamlined: Cason is a big spender.

The image at the bottom left on which “Coral Gables” appears (via Photoshop?) on the label of a liquor bottle is a particularly interesting touch. Are they trying to suggest Cason is living it up on the taxpayer’s dollar? Or that he’s a big drinker? Seems below the belt either way.

Note that this mailer, like the English-language one, is sourced to “Citizen Action Inc. 1172 S. Dixie Hwy #250”.

Posted in Coral Gables | Comments Off on Spanish Attack Mailer Aimed at Jim Cason

EFF Wins Round 1 of a Big One

Posted on March 15, 2013 by Michael Froomkin

National Security Letters Are Unconstitutional, Federal Judge Rules:

A federal district court judge in San Francisco has ruled that National Security Letter (NSL) provisions in federal law violate the Constitution. The decision came in a lawsuit challenging a NSL on behalf of an unnamed telecommunications company represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).

In the ruling publicly released today, Judge Susan Illston ordered that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) stop issuing NSLs and cease enforcing the gag provision in this or any other case. The landmark ruling is stayed for 90 days to allow the government to appeal.

…

The controversial NSL provisions EFF challenged on behalf of the unnamed client allow the FBI to issue administrative letters — on its own authority and without court approval — to telecommunications companies demanding information about their customers. The controversial provisions also permit the FBI to permanently gag service providers from revealing anything about the NSLs, including the fact that a demand was made, which prevents providers from notifying either their customers or the public. The limited judicial review provisions essentially write the courts out of the process.

In today’s ruling, the court held that the gag order provisions of the statute violate the First Amendment and that the review procedures violate separation of powers. Because those provisions were not separable from the rest of the statute, the court declared the entire statute unconstitutional.

Full text of the decision in In Re National Security Letter. If this is upheld by the 9th Circuit, I would imagine it would be headed straight for the Supreme Court.

OBDisclosure: I am proud to be a member of EFF’s Advisory Board.

Posted in Law: Constitutional Law, Law: Free Speech, National Security | 1 Comment