The Wash​ing​ton​Watch​.com blog has a breakout of all 36 bills in the “Coburn Omnibus.”

#36: a greenhouse in Suitland, Maryland!

Over at the new Wash​ing​ton​Watch​.com blog, I’ve posted a piece illustrating the simple modern mechanics of something Jefferson warned against: “The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.”

Congress is considering a bill to cancel the scheduled termination of a commission that studies minority veterans issues. It would only cost three cents per U.S. family to keep it going, but it’s one of nearly 10,000 bills of all different stripes pending in the current Congress.

Did minority veterans fight for a country where each group looks to the government for special treatment or a little cut of the loot from taxpayers? Or for the country where the people’s spirits are still free?

Here’s a good article by Declan McCullagh on New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s outrageous vendetta against Usenet. The article is good not only because yours truly is quoted.

… or so you would infer from a statistic reported on the Threat Level blog.

Threat Level reports on a new policy that has the Transportation Security Administration doing deep dives into people’s public-record dossiers when they arrive at airports without government-issued ID: “The new rules went into effect June 21, and in the first five days, 1705 people out of 10 million attempted to fly without identification and 59 of those were denied access to the plane.”

Fifty-nine refuseniks in five days works out to more than 11 terrorist attacks thwarted per day.

Of course, these weren’t actually terrorists. These were people whose papers weren’t in order. When this happens, TSA employees at its operations center in Virginia dig into public records databases and relay questions to screeners at the airports. If a traveler passes the test, he or she can fly. If the database information is wrong, or if the traveler is forgetful, he or she is stranded.

We were already quite a long way from getting any actual security benefit out of these programs, but as Threat Level suggests, all one need do to impersonate another is memorize the information about them in public records. I think this will happen most often among siblings and family members, who already know such info. But we’re talking about public records. They are collected, packaged, and sold by services like Lexis-Nexis. Sophisticated criminals and terrorists could get them just like anyone else.

Or they could present government-issued ID, having adopted the “clean-skin terrorist” technique that was recently reported to Capitol Hill by DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff.

But will it change policy?

To the amusement of those of us who have focused on the security value of watch-listing for some time now, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said some interesting things on Capitol Hill last week. Reports CBS News:

“The terrorists are deliberately focusing on people who have legitimate Western European passports, who don’t appear to have records as terrorists,” Chertoff told lawmakers. “I have a good degree of confidence we can catch people coming in. But I have to tell you … there’s no guarantee. And they are working very hard to slip by us.”

Perhaps this is new information to Secretary Chertoff. Perhaps this is revelation to lawmakers. But some of us have had in inkling about this problem for a little while now. In August 2004, the 9/11 Commission reported that two out of three terrorist planners prefer clean-skin terrorists. (Sound like a toothpaste commercial?) From page 234:

Khallad claims it did not matter whether the hijackers had fought in jihad previously, since he believes that U.S. authorities were not looking for such operatives before 9/11. But KSM asserts that yound mujahideen with clean records were chosen to avoid raising alerts during travel. The al Qaeda training camp head mentioned above [not identified by name in the report] adds that operatives with no prior involvement in activities likely to be known to international security agencies were purposefully selected for the 9/11 attacks.

Given the availability of this tactic, I wrote in my book Identity Crisis: How Identification is Overused and Misunderstood (available to anyone in Congress free for the asking going on two years now) that watch-listing is essentially impotent against terrorism.

So maybe Congress will now get it. But will it change policy?

Bob Blakely of the Burton Group has used the occassion of the millionth entry on the terrorist watch list to write on his personal blog about the chance of catching terrorists with watch-listing. He does an elaborate examination of the process given various reasonable assumptions about the number of border crossers and the number of terrorists, known and unknown. Read through it to take the nature of the problem and Bob’s thinking to heart, but here’s his conclusion:

[T]his system is trivially easy for even the dumbest terrorist to circumvent. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the thing to do to defeat this system is stop sending known terrorists through it. Catching a new recruit without a terrorist history happens only by accident, and it happens with very low probability. We’re spending God knows how many millions of dollars on this list, and it cannot possibly do the job for which it’s intended.

Bob has some understanding of bureaucratic behavior, and he has a clever answer to the question whether all this knowledge will change policy.

I realize that it’s bureaucratically impossible to dismantle a large government system which has been publicly criticized, so in a helpful and public-spirited gesture I’ll offer the following alternative suggestion:

Put everybody on the list.

It’s cheap, it’s fast, it’s inevitable eventually anyway as long as the list continues to grow at its current rate, and it makes checking people against the list really easy (you can do it even without a computer!).

Hilarious! That will satisfy the political impulse to double-down on bad policies, and once everyone is on it, the list can be ignored by our security bureaucracy, freeing it to focus on security measures that work.

Melissa Ngo reports and comments on her “Privacy Lives” blog about the passage of a particularly strong anti-REAL ID law in Louisiana.

There’s a gem in the comments from a military veteran on the notion that the Veterans Admininstration might withhold benefits to those not having a national ID as required under the REAL ID Act:

I would suggest those who are in office stop thinking you are in control of the American people. I for one went to war once, I am not afraid to do so again. The government serves the people, not the other way around.

My favorite anti-Google gadfly Scott Cleland has a post up entitled “Debunking the Google-Yahoo Antitrust Myths” in which he purports to debunk some erroneous thinking about the Google-Yahoo! deal.

Scott often furnishes the world with interesting ideas in an over-the-top way, but here I think he’s gotten it wrong.

He walks through a series of purported “myths” about the antitrust implications of Google-Yahoo!, which got a hearing in the Senate this week. I want to walk through just a couple of them because I think he’s framing the relevant market wrongly.

Cleland’s “Myth #1” is that there can’t be an antitrust problem as long as consumers are just one click away from a competitive search engine. Rather, he says, “Google is becoming a de facto essential facility for advertisers seeking to reach the global Internet audience.”

It’s helpful for him to frame the antitrust discussion of Google as being not about consumers’ access to search, but about advertisers access to eyeballs. The low barriers to entry for Google competitors is relevant, though. Too much success on the part of Google in capturing advertising market share will draw competitors to go after Google’s traffic, which is obviously crucial for holding advertising market share. They can do so easily because, indeed, consumers are one click away from competitive search engines and every other site or service they might visit.

“Myth #2: There can be no antitrust problem because Google and search advertising comprise such a small percentage of the advertising market.” Debunking it, Cleland says:

The relevant antitrust market is search advertising because there is no competitive substitute for search advertising. As Google has successfully convinced advertisers, search is a unique way to reach consumers because people self-identify their intentions through active search that they don’t do when they are a passive consumers of mass media advertising through: TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, billboards, or direct mail. Moreover, the search medium enables collection of unprecedented private information about intentions, preferences, economic suitability, etc., which enables unprecedented “targeting” of users with “relevant” advertising that consumers will be most receptive to.

(characteristically quirky formatting omitted)

This I think is wrong. Cleland has whittled down the market to where Google has unique strengths, but that is not the relevant market to this dispassionate, forward-thinking observer. Of course Google has convinced advertisers of how special search advertising is, but that doesn’t make it true. There are plenty of ways to target advertising equally well or better than through search, and the large consumer data and targeted marketing industry is there because of it. (Here’s the DMOZ directory of “micromarketing” firms, for example.)

What’s more, there are plenty of ways to target equally well or better than with search terms. Providers of hosted email, hosted documents, chat, microblogging, and other services have access to information as good or better than what Google has about people’s particular interests at particular times. They are all positioned to deploy targeted ad systems like Google’s keyed to the content that they process for users.

Whether they deploy such a thing or not depends on whether Google is able to reap higher than ordinary rents from its access to search information. If Google-Yahoo! is prevented from going forward and the two companies are prevented from increasing their profits through the combination — it remains speculative that they will — a signal to potential competitors will not go out, and innovations along many vectors will not materialize.

With due respect: Not this time, Scott! Let the markets and the technologies play out as they will.