Freedom

Just another word for nothing left to lose

By Jess Kilby

By the time you read this, the Fourth of July will have come and gone. The country will be back to its working week, and fleeting reflections on liberty and freedom will have faded, like our hangovers and our sunburns.

But from where I’m sitting, the fireworks on the Eastern Prom are still a few hours from bursting in midair, and the soaring temperature is lending itself to a decidedly subdued Independence Day. The heat is like a sedative; it’s hard to think, and easy to sit and do nothing at all.

Yes, I’m driving at a metaphor — and a heavy-handed one, at that. But it’s a heavy situation at the heart of this conceit.

For the past 10 months, Americans have been living in a static of fear and confusion. We’ve been intimidated, lied to, and manipulated by our government. We’ve been witness to a relentless parade of laws that are kicking our Constitution in the teeth, and many of us, understandably, have shut down. We don’t want to think about it anymore. We barely register the fact that many of these new laws have nothing to do with terrorism.

This suffocating crush of apathy works well for the government: The more complex (and insidious) the legislation, the harder it is for all those Jefferson-quoting freedom fighters to frame an argument that the masses can not only understand, but rally behind. Throw a little technology into the mix, as has been the trend, and it becomes impossible to separate the signal from the noise: Can they actually do that? Is it possible? Is it legal? And will it really affect my life?

Yes, it will. Case in point: HR 4633, the Driver’s License Modernization Act of 2002. Introduced on May 1, the bill has been denounced by a coalition of no less than 40 organizations — spanning the ideological spectrum from the ACLU to the staunchly conservative Eagle Forum — for using the “bureaucratic back door of state drivers’ licenses” to establish the type of national ID program the government swore it would never create.

In essence, the bill proposes a system where all states would have five years to standardize their drivers’ licenses and ID cards. Cards would include biometric data (a fingerprint or retina scan), and would be linked to a nationwide database that would be accessible not only by government officials, but also by private industry. Meaning?

“Employers, landlords, insurers, credit agencies, mortgage brokers, direct mailers, private investigators, civil litigants, and a long list of other private parties would also begin requiring the ID, further eroding the privacy that Americans rightly expect in their personal lives,” ruminates the June 27 coalition letter opposing the bill, addressed to the House of Representatives.

Moreover, the coalition argues, such a system would create a dangerous, false sense of security, by allowing would-be terrorists to obtain legitimate IDs with illegitimate birth certificates and Social Security cards, documents for which no increased security measures have been proposed. And how safe is your identity, really, when Japanese scientists have already proven that the most modern fingerprint scanner can be fooled by the likes of a Gummi Bear?

(It’s also worth noting that HR 4633 — which, as you can imagine, would require massive amounts of networking, databasing, and other technological support — is sponsored by US Representatives. James Moran (D) and Tom Davis (R), who represent tech-heavy districts in Northern Virginia.)

It’s tempting to dismiss the viability of this fascist piece of pork, which is currently under the review of three House committees and has many bullets to dodge if it’s ever to reach a final roll call. But we’ve already seen what our elected officials are capable of: the PATRIOT Act, which violates the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments in ways that would make even J. Edgar Hoover blush; the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which rewrites American copyright law in such ill-informed ways that certain methods of technological advancement have become illegal; and the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA), which requires libraries to put porn filters on their computers in order to receive federal funding.

CIPA was recently struck down as unconstitutional by a federal court in Pennsylvania, and is now headed to the Supreme Court for further review. But that’s no reason to breathe easy; CIPA is one potential victory among a landslide of losses, both foregone and imminent.

The Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA), for example — which is currently in committee in the US Senate — would require all creators and distributors of “digital media devices” (hardware and software that can reproduce or display copyrighted works) to include government-approved security standards. These standards would presumably correlate to copy-protection devices that the entertainment industry would embed in its products. No key for the lock? No media for you.

The CBDTPA contains a slew of other provisions, all of which work in concert to ensure that the entertainment industry will have a stranglehold on both the message and the medium. And when lawmakers take such an omnibus approach to legislating on an issue — any issue — it’s hard not to feel like resistance is futile. Who can fight such an all-encompassing assault?

For what it’s worth, hackers at this weekend’s H2K2 conference in New York City are going to try. As part of a concerted effort by the tech community to get legislators to pull their heads out of their asses, forums at the three-day event will cover such topics as “Educating Lawmakers — Is It Possible?”

It may be. At the very least, we can educate ourselves. And we’ll always have Jefferson.

Jess Kilby can be reached at jkilby@phx.com. “Technophilia” highlights the latest and greatest of the tech world and runs once a month.