Has Washington Forgotten About the Right to Privacy?

This article is part of a series focusing on Lens of Liberty, a project of the Vernon K. Krieble Foundation. In her Liberty Minute titled “Browsing the Fourth Amendment,” Helen Krieble sheds light on the government’s failure to regulate private companies who regularly violate Americans’ Fourth Amendment rights: Do you want telemarketers to know what you searched for online? Should strangers be able to access your financial information? The current national debate about peoples’ internet browsing privacy is a bedrock principles issue. Some private companies like Google and Facebook collect data from their customers and sell it to advertisers without

This GOP-Backed Bill Could Be the Next Step to a National Citizen Database

In August, I expressed a bit of hope that maybe, just maybe the federal educrats and their minions in the corporate and foundation world were starting to listen to the concerns of parents surrounding student data privacy. The executive director of the Commission on Evidence Based Policymaking (CEP) gave a speech where she acknowledged the great “passion around student privacy.” Sadly, that was before CEP’s final report came out urging the destruction of the prohibition on the student unit record system (resulting in the non-consensual tracking of individual student data through college and into the workplace), despite acknowledging that they received

A US National ID System Would Be a Recipe for Disaster

This article was originally posted at The Federalist. Kyle Sammin cogently argues that the United States should implement a voluntary national identity system in the wake of the Equifax hacking. Debate about this issue has roiled for decades. Although numerous countries have a national identification system, Americans have long resisted the idea. The Social Security number (SSN) has certainly expanded beyond its original purpose of serving as an account number for benefits, but policy-makers have repeatedly rejected calls to convert it into an identifier. The Clinton administration’s 1993 proposal of a “Health Security Card” never got off the ground, and even after the September 11, 2001

Keep Up the Great Work, Parents! The Educrats Are Starting to Listen

In a rare case for the “Maybe They are Starting to Listen” file, a commissioner on the Commission for Evidence-based Policymaking (CEP) admitted “there’s a lot of passion around student privacy.” Education Week quoted Commissioner Shelly Wilkie Martinez, CEP’s executive director, in a recent article about the potential recommendations for their report coming out in September: It’s been months of digging in a field full of landmines. For example, Martinez said that the week after many researchers and postsecondary education groups argued to end a ban on federal “student unit data systems” which would track individual students’ data from K-12 schooling through