Washington Post:Immigration Plan Gets a Boost

Immigration Plan Gets a Boost
Chertoff to Tour Border With Lawmakers Seeking a Compromise

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 24, 2006; A04

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff will tour the Texas-Mexico border this morning with the conservative authors of a congressional immigration compromise, in what will be the clearest sign yet that the Bush administration is prepared to make major concessions to reach an immigration deal this year.

Chertoff's appearance with Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) and Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) is "in no way meant to signal an endorsement" of their compromise, Department of Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said. But it was seen by supporters and opponents yesterday as a boost for the plan and a significant White House concession to conservatives.

Under the compromise, most of the nation's 11 million illegal immigrants would be allowed a chance to work in the country legally -- and possibly earn citizenship. But no guest-worker program would be made operational until stringent border-security measures are implemented, and illegal immigrants would have to report to privately run "Ellis Island" centers in Mexico to apply for legal work permits.

President Bush has maintained that a crackdown on the border could work only if new avenues toward legal work and citizenship were opened concurrently.

"The White House thinks we have a very interesting idea, and the president was very adamant about wanting to encourage my efforts," Pence said yesterday, after touring the border near San Diego. "Going to the border with Secretary Chertoff will help emphasize our seriousness about putting border security first."

With 15 scheduled legislative days left before Congress adjourns for the fall campaign, it is unclear whether any compromise stands a chance of passage. House leaders have spent the month staging "field hearings" on immigration. The hearings have raised sharp questions about guest-worker programs and have helped gird opposition to a Senate-passed bill, which includes such a program. Border security has moved to the forefront of Republican campaigns, from the frontier districts of Arizona to Upstate New York.

The Pence-Hutchison compromise has taken heat from conservatives, who say it would be exploited to allow a flood of illegal workers into the country and would still amount to amnesty for undocumented workers. And Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), a co-author of the Senate bill, said the plan's 17-year wait for full legalization and citizenship "fails the basic test of fairness."

But administration officials have ramped up efforts to win over conservatives as they push for an immigration deal this year. The Department of Homeland Security all but declared victory yesterday in its new policy of ending the "catch and release" program for illegal immigrants from nations other than Mexico. For years, such non-Mexican immigrants were released upon apprehension and told to report for deportation hearings. Few did.

The DHS said that in the second week of August, the Border Patrol apprehended 1,055 non-Mexican illegal immigrants and released seven of them. At this time last year, 34 percent of such migrants were detained. About 4,000 beds have been added to detention facilities this year. And with the support of newly deployed National Guardsmen, the authorities have caught 6,200 illegal immigrants since June 15. Seizures have included 130 vehicles, 31,000 pounds of marijuana, 1,500 pounds of cocaine and $11,000 worth of currency.

"There is a real deterrent effect to this policy," Chertoff told reporters in Washington, pointing to a 20,000 drop in the number of illegal immigrants caught crossing the southwest border between this summer and the same period last year. "Although we're not ready to declare victory -- we've got a lot more work to do -- it is encouraging."

By convincing conservatives that the government is serious about a border clampdown, administration officials hope to win some flexibility to negotiate a final legislative package that would include a guest-worker program. But the anti-illegal immigration firebrands who have driven the debate on the GOP side have shown no sign of budging.

Jim Gilchrist, a founder of the Minuteman Project, a citizens' border patrol, greeted news of Chertoff's appearance with Pence and Hutchison with a preemptive salvo. He called it "a staged public relations ploy by the White House to give the voting public the illusion that the administration is going to do something about border security."

The bipartisan coalition that passed the Senate's more lenient bill has also held together. The Pence-Hutchison plan "is just another distraction to try to kill the Senate-passed bill," said Jim Manley, spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).

Be an Expert on Anything By Stephen Colbert

Be an Expert on Anything

By Stephen Colbert

 

Stephen Colbert won’t be taking the advice offered in this guide. He has dedicated his career to passing himself off as an expert on anything. Colbert honed this skill on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he served as an analyst on everything from the Middle East to presidential gastronomy before gaining the title Senior Expert News Correspondent. He is a specialist in improv comedy, which he says “is partly about making people believe you know everything.” On Comedy Central’s hit show The Colbert Report, he goes beyond expertise into the arena of what he calls the anti-expert. “My show is an exercise in willfully ignorant, emotionally based, non-intellectual, -incurious passion about things. For instance, what gives Britannica the right to tell me that the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say 1941, that’s my right.” Don’t even think about arguing with him.

 

– John Hockenberry

 

PICK A FIELD THAT CAN'T BE VERIFIED. Try something like string theory or God’s will: “I speak to God. I’m sorry that you can’t also.” Security experts are in this category: They have security clearances, we don’t. We can’t question the expertise of the NSA because we are not in the NSA.

 

CHOOSE A SUBJECT THAT'S ACTUALLY SECRET. Dan Brown invented a secret subject for The Da Vinci Code, so now he is forever an expert on this secret subject that no one can challenge. Anybody who attacks the secret subject is, by definition, part of the cabal.

 

GET YOUR OWN ENTRY IN AN ENCYCLOPEDIA. In the media age, everybody was famous for 15 minutes. In the Wikipedia age, everybody can be an expert in five minutes. Special bonus: You can edit your own entry to make yourself seem even smarter.

 

USE THE WORD ZEITGEIST AS OFTEN AS POSSIBLE. Ideally, you want to find words that sound familiar but people don’t really know their definitions: zeitgeist, bildungsroman, doppelgänger – better yet, anything Latin. But avoid paradigm. It’s so 1994. If you say the word paradigm, everybody knows you’re a poser.

 

BE SURE TO USE LOTS OF ABBREVIATIONS AND ACRONYMS. Someone who says the words operations security may be educated, but the person who uses the military abbreviation Opsec is clearly an expert. If I use the term Gitmo, that means I’ve actually been there. If you say, “We’re going to Defcon 1,” it means you probably have the launch codes. Real experts don’t have time for extra syllables.

 

SPEAK FROM THE BALLS, NOT FROM THE DIAPHRAGM. In the expert game, you’ve got to have sack. That means speaking with confidence. In America, you’ve got to steer clear of nuance and ambivalence – and don’t even contemplate doubt.

 

DON'T BE AFRAID TO MAKE THINGS UP. Never fear being exposed as a fraud. Experts make things up all the time. They’re qualified to.

 

DON'T LIMIT YOURSELF TO CURRENT KNOWLEDGE. If you worry too much about being up-to-date, you miss out on vast territories of obsolete knowledge just waiting to be reclaimed. Think of leech-craft and all the lonely experts in the use of the little creatures, which are now experiencing a renaissance in health care.

 

GET AN HONORARY PHD. They work wonders. I have a doctorate in fine arts from Knox College in Illinois. All I did was give a speech, and now everybody has to call me Dr. Colbert.

 

MAKE A HABIT OF NAME-DROPPING. Say things like “I was talking to John Hockenberry yesterday for my story in Wired. Have you seen my cover?” I plan to use this issue of Wired to assert that I now know everything about wires.

 

BE FAMOUS. IT HELPS.

 

 

From Agence France Presse: Computer hackers get lesson on cloning passport, cash card tags

by Glenn ChapmanSun Aug 6, 9:54 AM ET

High-tech passports touted as advances in national security can be spied on remotely and their identifying radio signals cloned, computers hackers were shown at a conference.

Radio frequency identification technology, referred to as RFID, used in cash cards and passports, can be copied, blocked or imitated, said Melanie Rieback, a privacy researcher at Vrije University in the Netherlands.

Rieback demonstrated a device she and colleagues at Vrije built to hijack the RFID signals that manufacturers have touted as unreadable by anything other than proprietary scanners.

"I spend most of my time making the RFID industry's life miserable," the doctorate student told AFP. "I am not anti-RFID. It has the potential to make people's lives easier, but it needs to be used responsibly."

Rieback and university compatriots expected to have a reliable portable version of their device, RFID Guardian, finished in six months and "had no plans to immediately mass-produce these things."

A cheer rose from the legion of hackers in the conference room when Rieback announced that the schematics and the computer codes for the device would be made public.

"The industry and government needs to not be scared of us," Rieback said. "They need to talk with us and to work with us. Hopefully, together we can come up with some kind of reasonable compromise."

RFID tags consist of a computer chips wrapped with tiny radio antennae. The chips store financial, identity, or other data that can then be sent to scanners by radio signals.

Retail behemoth Wal-Mart about two years ago embarked on a campaign to use RFID to track inventories and shipments from suppliers, and the devices are used on cargo shipped overseas in containers.

RFID tags have been used for decades to track cattle or wild animals.

It has become common in the United States for pet owners to have chips encased in glass, about the size of grains of rice, implanted under the skin of their dogs or cats so they can be identified and returned if they run away.

The European Central Bank has talked of putting RFID technology in euro currency, and such tags were used in World Cup Soccer tickets, according to the researcher.

Smart chips have been crafted into German passports and are being put into US passports. Stores have experimented with using the tags not only to track inventory, but to bill shoppers for purchases invisibly as they leave.

"It has been getting new life, and creating quite a stir," Rieback said of RFID use.

RFID equipment makers would be wise to ramp up encryption and other security while technology is catching on, according to Rieback. Rieback was not the only speaker at the gathering who claimed to have found RFID vulnerabilities.

"If you are using RFID on cows, who cares?" Rieback asked rhetorically. "But, with a passport, it only takes one breach at the wrong time and it could wreck it for the RFID industry."

The potential exists for unauthorized reading of cards, cloning, and tracking people who carry them, Rieback said.

Hacked chips could even be used to launch attacks on software in computers linked to scanning devices, according to the researcher.

RFID Guardian was designed to also block any selected tag from being read by scanners, legitimate or illicit.

"We are being foisted into this world where these tags are all around but we don't know when and how they are there," Rieback said. "The Guardian puts the control back in your hands."