New Jerseyans may get a chance to vote their Fourth Amendment preferences in the upcoming gubernatorial elections. Among the candidates is Chris Christie, who as U.S. Attorney for New Jersey authorized the tracking of suspects’ cell phones without getting a warrant.

On the campaign trail, President Obama promised to post bills online for five days before signing them.

Last week, President Obama signed three new bills into law. None of them received the promised “Sunlight Before Signing” treatment — at least, not as far as our research reveals. (The White House has yet to establish a uniform place on its Web site where the public can look for bills that the President has received from Congress.)

The new bills put today’s podcast on Obama’s five-day pledge slightly out of date. He is not batting .091 on his transparency pledge. He’s batting .071. The substance of the podcast remains true, however: This is still a worse record than the Nationals.

President Obama waited more than five days to sign two of the three bills he passed into law last week. The simple matter of posting them on White​house​.gov would have fulfilled the promise as to those bills — and would have brought his average up to .214.

The current list of new laws, with presentment date and signing date, is after the break.

I wrote here in February about the push and pull over “strip search machines,” also known as “whole-body imaging” and “millimeter wave scanning.”

The question is joined: How do you maintain privacy with a technology that’s fundamentally intrusive? Maybe by using it less. This week, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R‑UT) introduced a bill to limit the use of whole-body imaging.

H.R. 2027, the Aircraft Passenger Whole-Body Imaging Limitations Act of 2009, would place several limits:

• Whole-body imaging could not be the sole or primary method of screening a passenger, and it could only be used as a follow-up to other methods like metal detection.
• Passengers would have the right to opt for a pat-down search instead of whole-body imaging.
• Passengers subject to whole-body imaging would have to be provided information about the technology and the images it generates, on privacy policies, and the right to have the pat-down search instead.
• Images of passengers generated by whole-body imaging technology could not be stored, transferred, shared, or copied in any form after the passenger has passed through the security system.

Most of these protections are already TSA policy, but agency policies are relatively easy to change compared to federal law. Without limitations like this, these machines are on the natural, mission-creepy path to becoming mandatory.

Rules, of course, were made to be broken, and it’s only a matter of time — federal law or not — before TSA agents without proper supervision find a way to capture images contrary to policy. (Agent in secure area guides Hollywood starlet to strip search machine, sends SMS message to image reviewer, who takes camera-phone snap. TMZ devotes a week to the story, and the ensuing investigation reveals that this has been happening at airports throughout the country to hundreds of women travelers.)

So this bill is a step forward, but from a very backwards position. Ultimately, as I wrote before, the solution is to return responsibility for security to the airlines and airports, who are most interested in and capable of balancing all the factors that go into safe travel, including passengers’ privacy, comfort, and peace of mind.

Posted in London.

The Hill reports that Members of Congress who failed to disclose their earmark requests as required by new rules in the House will still get their goodies.

Members who failed to disclose their earmarks as required by the April 4 deadline should have them rejected out of hand. But Congress makes the rules, and Congress can break the rules.

Wash​ing​ton​Watch​.com compiled a state-by-state list of links to earmark requests recently. Because Members of Congress published their requests in different formats, information about all the earmarks that have been requested is still rather obscure.

Here’s Michigan state representative Paul Opsommer (R) on the Department of Homeland Security’s “Enhanced Driver’s License,” which contains a radio frequency identification chip with a long read range:

Expect the Department of Homeland Security to tell you what a great thing they are doing by allowing you the ability to buy these RFID licenses. They create the problem, provide a solution that is the cheapest for them and most risky for you, and then expect you to like it. But RFID is not mandated by Congress, and if enough states stand up for themselves the policy will be changed. Michigan needs to say no and do just that.

Did you ever notice how astronauts are praised simply for being astronauts? They have heroism imputed to them simply for what they might do in the future.

So it is with political appointees, such as the chief technology officer President Obama named Saturday morning during his weekly radio and Internet address. Reports the Wall Street Journal:

Silicon Valley execs and tech bloggers sounded genuinely excited about Obama’s choice Saturday morning and tech industry lobbying groups TechNet and the Business Software Alliance quickly released statements of support, as did several tech heavyweights.

Would any group with business before the government, hoping for influence and goodies from the White House, not praise an appointee? We learn from these paeans precisely nothing.

To me, Aneesh Chopra is an empty vessel. He looks like a nice person and appears to have suitable experience for the job he’s been named to. My substantive comments about him will wait until there is something on which to comment. I look forward to his first space-walk.