EFF Denounces Flawed E-Verify Proposal that Would Trample on Worker Privacy

[Jeffrey Walton <noloader () gmail com>]

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/eff-denounces-flawed-e-verify-proposal

Congress is considering a bill that would federalize E-Verify,
creating a single, government-controlled database of highly sensitive,
detailed information about every legal worker in the United States.
EFF joined the ACLU, the National Center for Transgender Equality, the
Liberty Coalition, and dozens of other civil liberties and labor
groups in urging Congress to uphold worker privacy and reject the
Legal Workforce Act.

The Legal Workforce Act (H.R. 2164) would require all employers to use
an Internet-based program called E-Verify to check every worker
against an error-prone database. In letters sent to both houses of
Congress, the coalition of advocacy groups decried the implementation
of a nationwide system that could lead to downstream abuses by
intelligence and law enforcement groups. The proposed bill could
create a bureaucratic nightmare for American businesses while
trampling on the privacy rights of workers.

The civil liberties groups raised particular concerns over identity
theft. The Chronology of Data Breaches—a review of all public,
sensitive records exposed through data breaches in the U.S.—lists over
534 million records since 2005, showcasing how prone large databases
are to breaches of all sorts. And these data breaches have real
repercussions—increasing the likelihood of identity theft by up to
four times, according to a 2009 Javelin Research & Strategy study. The
E-Verify proposal would make a database that includes information on
every legal United States worker, creating an enticement to malicious
hackers and an enormous risk of unintended disclosure.

...
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