A blueprint for immigration reform, including a path to citizenship some undocumented residents, is expected to be released this week by a 6 member Senate working group, that includes Senators Dick Durbin, John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Mark Rubio, Charles Schumer and Robert Menendez.

The Republicans in the group are going to stress tougher border security and more employer penalties. The Democrats (hopefully) will stress family reunification.

Mr. Durbin added that the effort will be focused on unifying families, and will include a version of the Dream Act, which would give undocumented students a path to permanent residency status.

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Google has issued a transparency report detailing requests by law enforcement for user data. For the first time, the report includes a breakdown of the types of legal process used to compel companies to hand over user data.

Requests for user data are up 70% from 2009.
For the last 6 months of 2012:

• 68 percent of the requests were made through subpoenas. (That is all that is required to obtain user-identifying information)
• 22 percent were through ECPA search warrants. "These are, generally speaking, orders issued by judges under ECPA, based on a demonstration of “probable cause” to believe that certain information related to a crime is presently in the place to be searched."
• The remaining 10 percent were mostly court orders issued under ECPA by judges or other processes that are difficult to categorize.

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TSA has ended its $5 million contract with OSI, which makes the Rapiscan Backscatter, one of two "people screening" machines using advanced imaging technology at airports.

OSI could not meet a deadline to come up with software that rendered the images generic. Instead, TSA will use machines by L3 Communications which produce generic passenger images. Here's the L3 page for the Provision II. L3 Communications announced a $245 million contract with TSA in November. Also in November, at a congressional hearing, allegations arose, which OSI denied, that it had falsified test results.[More...]

Yesterday, Declan McCullagh of CNET wrote an article stating that Sen. Patrick Leahy, bowing to pressure from conservatives and law enforcement groups, was revising his proposed bill amending the Electronic Communication Privacy Act (ECPA) to strengthen privacy rights and now going in the opposite direction. He posted a draft of a leaked copy of the amended bill (available here.) McCullagh wrote:

Patrick Leahy, the influential Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has dramatically reshaped his legislation in response to law enforcement concerns, according to three individuals who have been negotiating with Leahy's staff over the changes. A vote on his bill, which now authorizes warrantless access to Americans' e-mail, is scheduled for next week.

Leahy's rewritten bill would allow more than 22 agencies -- including the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Communications Commission -- to access Americans' e-mail, Google Docs files, Facebook wall posts, and Twitter direct messages without a search warrant.

Hours later, Sen. Leahy denied drafting or supporting the circulated revision of his proposed bill. [More...]

What will they think of next? Via ABC News (no video)

The New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission has cracked down on drivers smiling in their driver's license photos because their smiles could interfere with new facial recognition software.

Maybe next year they will come up with a tooth recognition system and made smiling mandatory.

Twitter has given up its fight against a court order requiring it to turn over tweets of Wall St Protester Malcolm Harris. It provided the tweets to the court today.

Harris was one of hundreds arrested during a mass protest on the Brooklyn Bridge in October 2011. The Manhattan district attorney's office wants the tweets, which are no longer available online, to try to undermine Harris' argument that police officers appeared to lead protesters on to the bridge's roadway only to arrest them for obstructing traffic.

The Harris case was unusual because Twitter joined the case as a third party, seeking to prevent the disclosure. On June 30, the Court ordered Twitter to comply.

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The FBI's $1 billion Next Generation Identification (NGI) programme is proceeding on schedule and should be fully launched by 2014. It's already in use in several states as test pilots, including Michigan, Hawaii, Maryland, and possibly Oregon.

NGI expands the FBI’s IAFIS criminal and civil fingerprint database to include multimodal biometric identifiers such as iris scans, palm prints, face-recognition-ready photos, and voice data, and makes that data available to other agencies at the state and federal levels.

The FBI page for the program is here. Here is a handy powerpoint on it from the 2010 Biometrics Conference. Here are the uses the FBI envisions for it: [More...]

U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton has ruled that the provision in S.B. 1070, Arizona's on-hold immigration law allowing police officers to ask for proof of lawful presence in the U.S. during a valid traffic stop can go into effect. Police are expected to start enforcing it in about 10 days.

Judge Bolton has closed the door on facial attacks to the statute. The Supreme Court ruled last year that this part of the law is constitutional because it requires police to check the documentation without regard to race or ethnicity.
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Today is the day that hundreds of thousands of undocumented young persons who have been residing in this country can start applying for a two year period of protection from deportation.

Under President Obama's recent order, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) is handling the applications. The forms became available today.

Individuals requesting consideration of deferred action for childhood arrivals must submit Form I-821D, Consideration of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, Form I-765, Application for Employment Authorization (with accompanying fees); and an I-765WS, Worksheet. USCIS recently developed a series of resources to inform the on how the process will work. The website, www.uscis.gov/childhoodarrivals, includes a flier, a How do I brochure, frequently asked questions, and a number of other resources. USCIS encourages individuals with questions to visit this website or call the USCIS National Customer Service line at 1-800-375-5283.

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Meet the Domain Awareness System, unveiled today by Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly. It was developed by Microsoft.

The Domain Awareness System... aggregates and analyzes information from cameras, license-plate readers, sensors and law enforcement database.

3,000 closed-circuit television cameras are connected to the system, mostly in mid and lower Manahttan.

The system allows investigators to instantly see information including arrest records, 911 calls associated with a suspect and related crimes occurring in a particular area.... It also allows investigators to map crimes to reveal patterns and track where a car associated with a suspect is located and has been in the past.

New details were released yesterday by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) about the application process for President Obama's new program deferring deportation for undocumented young residents for up to two years.

The cost for a work permit will be $465.00. Lawyers aren't needed. The applications will be available August 15.

Here is the press release. [More...]

Adm. Dennis Blair, the former director of National Intelligence, speaking at the Aspen Security Forum this weekend, told the audience that it is virtually impossible for the feds to identify and prevent a lone wolf attack like James Holmes, Jared Laughner or the Fort Hood shooter, without severely curtailing civil liberties:

[T]here would need to be a higher level of surveillance and government agencies would have to share more information, which could contradict an individual’s right to privacy, Blair said. “The cost in civil liberties and privacy that we would have to pay to get our intelligence to that level would [be high],” Blair said.

Matthew Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said there's a better way:

While there are 12,000 FBI agents, there are 2 million first responders, Olsen said. The government can help prevent the lone wolf attack by training those first responders on how to identify the potential threat, Olsen said. [More...]