Senators draft plan to rework U.S. immigration policy - washingtonpost.com: Via washingtonpost.com .

Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) announced the building blocks Thursday for a new push in Congress to overhaul the nation's immigration laws, outlining a plan to require U.S. citizens and legal immigrants to obtain a new high-tech Social Security card tied to their fingerprints or other biometric identifiers and to create a system to bring in temporary workers as the U.S. economy demands.

The immigration "blueprint," outlined in an opinion column posted on The Washington Post's Web site, drew an immediate vow of support from President Obama, who urged Congress "to act at the earliest possible opportunity." [ Read more ... ]

Worker ID Card at Center of Immigration Plan: Via Wall Street Journal.

Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.

Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.

The ID card plan is one of several steps advocates of an immigration overhaul are taking to address concerns that have defeated similar bills in the past.

The uphill effort to pass a bill is being led by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card. [ Read more ... ]

"Your Papers, Please!" - Get Your Fingerprints Ready! Cross-Party Senate Alliance Pushing National ID Card: Via Lauren Weinstein's Blog.

Greetings. According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. Senate immigration reform advocates Chuck Schumer and Lindsey Graham are proposing a mandatory biometric (e.g. fingerprint-based) National ID Card system, and are attempting to brush away privacy concerns as trivial and irrelevant.

Touted as "merely" a "right-to-work" card aimed at addressing illegal immigration concerns, there's simply no fast-talking around the fact that this plan will set in motion a massive national ID infrastructure that will ultimately penetrate every aspect of our lives. Anyone who suggests otherwise is -- sorry to say -- either a liar or a fool. [ Read more ... ]

The Score on USA Patriot Act: Via Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union.

"We've come to love our fears more than we love our freedoms," Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) mused on the House floor just before that chamber voted 315-97 (with 20 members not voting) to reauthorize the USA Patriot Act without any changes for yet another year.

By now, you know the stakes — the tweaks that could have been made to guarantee that Patriot powers are used only against suspected terrorists or spies and to mandate continued reporting to ensure that we actually learn about current and future Patriot abuses. Many of these fixes were, in fact, included in prior iterations of Patriot reauthorization bills introduced in both the House and the Senate.

As Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) pointed out to her colleagues, "I think we are missing an opportunity. There are good ideas in this House about how to curb the abuses with national security letters, how to clarify that roving wiretaps are limited to a single identifiable target, and how to eliminate the lone wolf provision which has never been used and for which existing title III authority can suffice. Those ideas have been the subject of hearings in the Judiciary Committee, but they're not being debated on this floor . . . I think this is a real missed opportunity." [ Read more ... ]

Deceptively simple Patriot Act extension - a giant blow: Via LibraryLaw Blog.

By now you've heard that the Patriot Act provisions that were due to sunset Feb. 28, 2010 have been extended until Feb. 28, 2011. It sounds deceptively simple, a mild one-year extension.

But it's not. It undoes months, no years of work to add a few checks and balances to better extension bills. I will write up a longer post very soon, but the thrust of it is that we are stuck with an unchanged Sect. 215, often called "the library records" provision, a broad authority that doesn't require particularized suspicion.

Far worse, to my mind, is what's NOT included in this extension. Small but important reforms to the National Security Letter (NSL) provisions were riding on more favorable extension bills. The NSL provisions do not sunset, and the momentum to reform them vanishes with the straight-up one-year sunset extension.

Read Original Article:(Via LibraryLaw Blog.)

Epic Fail in Congress: USA PATRIOT Act Renewed Without Any New Civil Liberties Protections: Via EFF.org Updates.

Yesterday evening, the U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to renew three expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, after the Senate abandoned the PATRIOT reform effort and approved the extension by a voice vote on Wednesday night.

Disappointingly, the government's dangerously broad authority to conduct roving wiretaps of unspecified or "John Doe" targets, to secretly wiretap of persons without any connection to terrorists or spies under the so-called "lone wolf" provision, and to secretly access a wide range of private business records without warrants under PATRIOT Section 215 were all renewed without any new checks and balances to prevent abuse. Despite months of vigorous debate, when PATRIOT renewal bills providing for greater oversight and accountability were approved by the Judiciary Committees of both the House and the Senate, Democratic leaders' push for reform fizzled in the face of staunch Republican opposition buoyed by recent hot-button events such as the attempted bombing of an airliner on Christmas Day and the shooting at Fort Hood. [ Read more ... ]

Congress Drops the Ball on Upgrading Patriot Protections: Via Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union.

We're sorry to say, but is anyone surprised that Congress has capitulated to post-underpants bomber fear-mongering and passed the three expiring provisions of the Patriot Act without so much as a debate?

Oh, you didn't hear about that?

Wednesday night, the Senate passed a straight one-year extension by voice vote, and last night, the House followed suit.

That’s right. No changes. Nothing. Nada. Zip, zilch, zero. (You get the picture.)

That leaves ordinary Americans like you and me without the civil liberties safeguards proposed by several bills last year. Both the House and Senate had bills that would have improved the Patriot Act. The Senate bill even had the support of the White House. But instead of passing the much-needed reforms, Congress: [ Read more ... ]

Democrats retreat on new privacy protections: Via The Washington Post .

Democrats have retreated from adding new privacy protections to the nation's primary counterterrorism law, stymied by Senate Republicans who argued the changes would weaken terror investigations.

The proposed protections were cast aside when Senate Democrats lacked the necessary 60-vote supermajority to pass them. Dashing the hopes of liberals, the Senate Wednesday night instead passed - by voice vote without debate - a one-year extension of key parts of the USA Patriot Act that would have expired on Sunday.

Thrown away were restrictions and greater scrutiny on the government's authority to spy on Americans and seize their records.

The House was prepared to approve the extension Thursday, dropping even more extensive privacy protections approved by the House Judiciary Committee. [ Read more ... ]

Senator Demands IP Treaty Details: Via Threat Level.

That a U.S. senator must ask a federal agency to share information regarding a proposed and “classified” international anti-counterfeiting accord the government has already disclosed is alarming. Especially when the info has been given to Hollywood, the recording industry, software makers and even some digital-rights groups.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) is demanding that U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk confirm leaks surrounding the unfinished Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, being negotiated largely between the European Union and United States. Among other things, Wyden wants to know if the deal creates international guidelines that mean consumers lose internet access if they are believed to be digital copyright scofflaws.

He also wants to know whether internet service providers could lose “safe harbor” protection for failing to police their customers’ digital content for copyright infringement violations. Such a move would heap copyright liability onto the ISP, and fundamentally alter U.S. copyright law.

What “legal incentives,” Wyden asked Kirk in a Wednesday letter, would “encourage Online Service Providers (OSPs) to cooperate with copyright owners to deter the unauthorized storage or transmission of copyrighted materials.”

The questions came weeks after leaked documents from the European Union suggested the United States was taking those positions on the accord’s draft internet section. [ Read more ... ]

Keeping Personal Data Private: Via Editorial NYTimes.com .

In 2006, a Veterans Affairs Department analyst lost a laptop and external drive with Social Security numbers and other personal data from more than 26 million veterans and active duty troops. There was a national call for a federal law to protect this sort of data — as there has been after other big data breaches — but nothing was done. Finally, a bill is moving in the Senate that would put more protections in place for personal data.

Computers hold an enormous amount of personal information about people. In the wrong hands, the data can be used to steal identities or drain bank accounts. There is a patchwork of laws that offers varying levels of protection to residents of most, but not all, states, but there is no overarching federal law.

Senator Patrick Leahy, a Democrat of Vermont, is sponsoring a bill, the Personal Data Privacy and Security Act of 2009, [ Read more ... ]

Stopping the ACTA Juggernaut: Via EFF.org Updates.

The ACTA juggernaut continues to roll ahead, despite public indignation about an agreement supposedly about counterfeiting that has turned into a regime for global Internet regulation. The Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) has already announced that the next round of Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) negotiations will take place in January — with the aim of concluding the deal "as soon as possible in 2010."

For the rest of us, with access to only leaks and whispers of what ACTA is about, there are many troubling questions. How can such a radical proposal legally be kept so secret from the millions of Net users and companies whose rights and freedoms stand to be affected? Who decides what becomes the law of the land and by what influence? Where is the public oversight for an agreement that would set the legal rules for the knowledge economy? And what can be done to fix this runaway process?

We wrestle with these questions in an essay on “The Impact of ACTA on the Knowledge Economy”(PDF here) in the Yale Journal of International Law Online. [ Read more ... ]

MPAA Says Copyright-Treaty Critics Hate Hollywood: Via Threat Level.

If you don’t back a copyright treaty being negotiated in secret, you must want to destroy Hollywood, its blockbuster movies and all the jobs they create.

At least that’s the message from the Motion Picture Association of America.

It’s spelled out in a Thursday memo to the Senate Judiciary Committee, urging lawmakers to support the Obama administration’s efforts toward negotiating an intellectual property agreement with more than a dozen countries.

Dan Glickman, the MPAA’s chairman, informs lawmakers that millions of film-related jobs are in peril because of internet piracy. Simply put, those who don’t back the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting and Trade Agreement don’t support intellectual property rights, he wrote. [ Read more ... ]

National Data Breach Laws Move Through Senate: Via Threat Level.

A national data breach law got closer to passage this week.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved two bills Thursday that address data security and breach notification, according to Government Information Security. The legislation was drafted in response to the plague of data thefts that have occurred over the last few years.

The Personal Data Privacy and Security Act would set standards for protecting sensitive personally identifying information and impose civil penalties for those caught violating them. [ Read more ... ]

House, Senate get separate bills to kill net neutrality: Via Law & Disorder Section - Ars Technica.

Real argument about "network neutrality" is fascinating stuff, provocative and well worth anyone's time if they care about the Internet. Unfortunately, Congress isn't great at having intelligent arguments, and net neutrality is rapidly on its way to becoming the latest victim of the Sound Bite Wars. [ Read more ... ]

House Patriot Act Bill Draws Broad Support On Account of National Security Letter Fix: Via CDT - PolicyBeta.

A coalition of 20 civil liberties organizations, including the Center for Democracy & Technology, released a letter today endorsing H.R. 3845, the USA Patriot Amendments Act. The bill was introduced by the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) and Subcommittee Chairs Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) and Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA). The Senate version of the legislation, the PATRIOT Act Sunset Extension Act, S. 1692, has not drawn a similar level of support in the civil liberties community, largely because of the different ways the bills deal with National Security Letters. CDT has prepared a chart that compares the two bills.

An NSL is a simple form document issued by the FBI and other intelligence agencies that requires Internet Service Providers, banks and other financial institutions, and credit agencies to turn over records about their customers. There is no judicial authorization; the letters are issued when the agency seeking the records decides that they are relevant to its own investigation. The letters are usually accompanied by a “gag” order that, with limited exceptions, bars anyone from disclosing that information was sought or obtained with an NSL. Two Inspector General reports have found widespread abuse and misuse of NSLs. [ Read more ... ]

The Ghost of Patriot Past: Via CDT - PolicyBeta.

It seems like the debate over health care reform has sucked all the oxygen out of the public dialog, as if nothing else were happening here in Washington. Think again. Perhaps one of the most significant “behind the scenes” actions happened late last week when the Obama Administration failed to support significant changes to the Patriot Act that would have given Americans stronger civil liberties protections.

More disturbing, it appears that the Administration took an active part in opposing changes supported by civil liberties groups, such as CDT, that would have gone a long way toward correcting several flaws in the Patriot Act. [ Read more ... ]

Round-Up of Reactions to Yesterday's PATRIOT Vote: Via EFF.org Updates.

Yesterday, as the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to recommend and send to the Senate floor a USA PATRIOT Act renewal bill lacking critical civil liberties reforms, EFF's reaction was much the same as Senator Feingold's, as he expressed in his post-vote blog post at Daily Kos.

Feingold, one of only three Democrats to vote against the bill and a sponsor of the PATRIOT reform bill the JUSTICE Act, was left scratching his head over how a Democratic super-majority with a Democratic Administration could so thoroughly fail at reforming the PATRIOT Act, a law long maligned by Democrats as an affront to civil liberties. He closed by posing a choice to his Democratic colleagues: "In the end...Democrats have to decide if they are going to stand up for the rights of the American people or allow the FBI to write our laws." [ Read more ... ]

Obama Sides with Republicans; PATRIOT Act Renewal Bill Passes Senate Judiciary Committee Minus Critical Civil Liberties Reforms: Via EFF.org Updates.

Well, it looks like most of the Senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee weren't swayed by this morning's New York Times editorial, which cited this morning's Committee meeting to consider USA PATRIOT Act renewal as a "critical chance to add missing civil liberties and privacy protections, address known abuses and trim excesses that contribute nothing to making America safer." Instead, the Committee just passed a bill to renew all of the PATRIOT powers that were set to expire at the end of the year, with only a handful of the original reforms that were first proposed by Senators Feingold and Durbin's JUSTICE Act and Committee Chairman Leahy's original PATRIOT renewal bill.

Instead of adding more protections to the bill, as EFF and the Times have been urging (along with many other Americans who have been organizing Facebook and Twitter activism around PATRIOT reform), the Committee this morning voted to accept seven Republican amendments to the USA PATRIOT Act Sunset Extension Act to remove the few civil liberties protections left in the bill after it was already watered down at last Thursday's Committee meeting. Surprisingly and disappointingly, most of those amendments were recommended to their Republican sponsors by the Obama Administration. [ Read more ... ]

Senators Vote to Renew Patriot Act Spy Powers: Via Threat Level.

A deeply divided Senate committee on Thursday forwarded legislation to the full Senate that reauthorizes three expiring provisions of the Patriot Act hastily adopted in the wake of the 2001 terror attacks.

The measures greatly expanded the government’s ability to spy on Americans in the name of national security.

Thursday’s 11-8 vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee came as lawmakers struggled to beat a looming deadline. The three provisions expire at year’s end.

During more than two hours of sometimes heated debate among the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, some lawmakers accused one another of caving to intelligence officials who wanted to expand their powers while other senators said the renewal was necessary to protect against looming, and classified, terror threats. [ Read more ... ]

Congress Is Losing Its Chance To Reform The Patriot Act: Via Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union.

(Originally posted on Huffington Post.)

Tomorrow the Senate Judiciary Committee will continue its debate over a bill that reauthorizes three Patriot Act provisions due to expire on December 31. The bill, The USA PATRIOT Act Sunset Extension Act, includes minor tweaks to the Patriot Act but does not go nearly far enough to thoroughly protect the Fourth Amendment rights of Americans.

The Patriot Act is a reactionary law. It was passed 45 days after 9/11 with virtually no debate and granted the government sweeping surveillance powers including the ability to conduct secret searches of Americans’ homes without warrants or even the presence of the resident.

Easily one of the most dangerous powers handed over in the Patriot Act was the expansion of the National Security Letters (NSL) statute which allows the government to demand a huge variety of our information (medical records, tax records, books we borrow from the library, etc.) from recipients like Internet service providers (ISP), financial institutions, and libraries without any proper judicial oversight. Oh, and it contains a gag order for recipients. The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General has released two consecutive reports in the last several years detailing the FBI’s flagrant and systemic misuse of the NSL statute. [ Read more ... ]

Tip of the Hat, Wag of the Finger: PATRIOT Edition: Via EFF.org Updates.

Yesterday's Senate Judiciary mark-up of legislation to renew expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act was extremely disheartening--in particular because of many committee Democrats' failure to support new civil liberties reforms to PATRIOT(see our summary here). Those Senators who failed to stand foursquare behind Americans' right to privacy against government spying should be on notice that Americans who care about civil liberties are very disappointed; those that did stand up for our rights deserve our vocal thanks.

Our first wag of the finger goes to Senators Leahy and Feinstein. We expressed our disappointment with Senator Leahy last week when instead of sponsoring the Feingold/Durbin JUSTICE Act he introduced his own PATRIOT renewal bill with much fewer surveillance reforms. Most notably, that bill did not contain any reforms to last year's FISA Amendments Act, which is an even graver threat to Americans' privacy than PATRIOT. [ Read more ... ]

Salon Radio: Patriot Act and FISA reforms: Via Salon: Glenn Greenwald.

(updated below - Update II)

When Congress enacted the Patriot Act in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, it provided for a four-year expiration date for some of the more controversial provisions.  In 2005, when it was time for Congress to decide if those should be extended, the Bush administration insisted that none of those powers had been abused yet (like everything) they were critical to fighting Terrorism.  As a result, the Congress thus overwhelmingly voted to extend them for four more years, though this time they required the issuance of a report from the Inspector General of the Justice Depratment to determine if there had, in fact, been any abuses.  Unsurprisingly, the IG's Report that issued in 2007 and 2008 documented extreme abuse at the FBI with many of those powers.  Moreover, it was recently revealed that, far more often than not, federal law enforcement agencies use these powers (including the pernicious "sneak and peek" searches) in cases having nothing whatsoever to do with Terrorism. [ Read more ... ]

The Government Isn’t Above the Law: Via Blog of Rights: Official Blog of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Or at least it shouldn’t be. Today we filed an appeal of our lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), the law passed last summer that essentially legalized former President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ international phone calls and emails. In August, U.S. District Court Judge John G. Koeltl for the Southern District of New York dismissed our case on "standing" grounds, ruling that the plaintiffs — among them journalists, lawyers and nongovernmental organizations who engage in sensitive international communication which they have reason to fear will be intercepted by the government — did not have the right to challenge the new surveillance law because they could not prove that their own communications had been monitored under it. [ Read more ... ]

Lawmakers Cave to FBI in Patriot Act Debate: Via Threat Level.

Powerful Senate leaders on Thursday bowed to FBI concerns that adding privacy protections to an expiring provision of the Patriot Act could jeopardize “ongoing” terror investigations.

The Patriot Act was adopted six weeks after the 2001 terror attacks, and greatly expanded the government’s power to intrude into the private lives of Americans in the course of anti-terror and criminal investigations. Three provisions are expiring at year’s end.

During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Sen. Patrick Leahy, the committee chairman,  and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) introduced last-minute changes (.pdf) that would strip away some of the privacy protections Leahy had espoused just the week before. The Vermont Democrat said his own, original proposal of last week could jeopardize ongoing terror investigations.

“All of us are mindful that threats against American safety are real and continuing,” Leahy said at the hearing . “I’m trying to introduce balances on both sides.” [ Read more ... ]

PATRIOT Act Debate Must Include Reform of Last Year's FISA Amendments Act: Via EFF.org Updates.

Today, the American Constitution Society's blog, ACSblog, was gracious enough to let EFF's Kevin Bankston guest blog about the current debate over renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act. Kevin took the opportunity to highlight the need for Congress to revisit the broad surveillance authority granted by last year's FISA Amendments Act (FAA) when it considers reforming the PATRIOT Act. Kevin argues that "from a civil liberties perspective, focusing on reforming the PATRIOT Act without also considering FAA reform is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic." The entire blog post is here.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is planning to consider PATRIOT renewal and reform Thursday. It's important to let your Senators know that you support both PATRIOT reform and FAA reform, including repeal of the immunity for telcos like AT&T that assisted in the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program. If you haven't already, please visit our action center and contact your Senators now!

Read Original Article:(Via EFF.org Updates.)