More Legislative Feature Creap
I’ve previously compared legislative add-ons to feature creap - the bane of any geek developer. Declan McCullagh, in a CNET article, goes in depth on the practice. It’s an insightful (and infuriating) look into how way too much technology policy is created in the US. From the piece:
• The Real ID Act, which creates a national ID card starting in 2008, was glommed onto an $82 billion “emergency” military spending bill (HR1268) last year. Unless Americans are outfitted with these federalized ID cards, they won’t be able to do things like board airplanes or enter national parks and some government buildings.
Rep. Ron Paul, a libertarian-leaning Texas Republican, warned at the time that the Real ID Act “offers us a false sense of greater security at the cost of taking a gigantic step toward making America a police state.” But the spending bill sailed through the Senate unanimously and met with only a few dissenting votes in the House.
• Slapping a $15 taxon .com, .net and .org domain names in 1998 was part of an “emergency supplemental appropriations” bill (HR3579) to fund the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. The cash went to politically-savvy Network Solutions, now part of VeriSign.
• Enacting a controversial proposal to punish Web masters with six months in prison if they publicly post anything that’s “harmful to minors.” Instead of holding an honest, up-or-down vote on the Child Online Protection Act, politicians slipped it into an “omnibus” bill (HR4328) to fund the bulk of the federal government, including the Treasury Department. COPA is being challenged in court by the American Civil Liberties Union.
• Coercing libraries and schools into filtering Internet connections was done through the simple expedient of attaching it to an unrelated spending bill (HR4577) to fund the Treasury Department, Labor Department and Congress itself. A divided Supreme Court upheld the restrictions as constitutional.
Upset now? You should be. Loopholes in the process are being exploited to support potentially harmful technology legislation. But what can be done?
