American Civil Liberties Union

Sometimes sharing is bad. Don’t worry. We don’t plan to rush into kindergartens across America and break the news to all the 5-year-olds, but it’s true. Especially when it comes to national security and your privacy, it may be necessary to collect and use certain information, but wrong to share it.

When a federal government advisory committee recently revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (which contains both the Secret Service and the TSA) is in the “process of creating a policy framework and technology architecture for enhancing DHS's information-sharing capabilities,” it immediately raised these types of concerns and today we sent a letter to DHS outlining those concerns.

Veterans of Washington D.C. political scene are well familiar with congressional staff briefings. For the overwhelming majority of you who don’t share that dubious honor, these briefings are aimed at congressional staff and the public in an effort to avoid holding many individual meetings on a specific issue. They are typically dry affairs with a few panelists and some Q&A.

That was not the experience I had yesterday afternoon. The Competitive Enterprise Institute, a libertarian think tank, held a briefing on legislation that would make the E-Verify program mandatory. E-Verify is an ongoing effort by the federal government to essentially produce a giant list of everyone who is authorized to work in the United States. Supporters want all employers to check it before they can hire a new employee. As the ACLU has said in the past, the system is riddled with errors, keeps lawful employees from working, lacks due process and may result in a national ID system.