Dear Neighbor,
Per the Minnesota Constitution, the Legislature is required to adjourn at 11:59 p.m. this coming Monday. We are scheduled to be in session both Saturday and Sunday this weekend as efforts to assemble a new state budget for the 2016-17 biennium continue.
Agreement has been reached by the House, Senate and Gov. Mark Dayton on some of the smaller areas of the budget appropriation such as funding for higher education and public safety/courts. Discussions continue on larger areas of the budget appropriation such as K-12 education and health and human services. In the remaining hours before required adjournment, changes will move quickly once agreement is reached on each section of the budget. The Revisor's Office will be working around the clock to draft lengthy pieces of formal legislation before the House and Senate can consider them for final passage and presentation to the governor for his action.
Auto License Plate Readers
While the new two-year state budget remains a work in progress, the House has been busy this week taking up non-budget items on the floor.
Automatic license plate readers use small, high-speed cameras mounted on police cars or fixed objects such as road signs, bridges, or telephone poles to photograph and retain up to thousands of license plates per minute. Information included in the data capture includes not only the license plate number but also the date/time stamp and location of every scan. The bill passed off the House floor allows the data to be retained for 30 days.
I strongly oppose government collecting vast data on law abiding citizens and I strongly oppose ALPR due to the privacy intrusions on law abiding citizens by government.
Secure360 Conference
In the non-political arena, I attended the Secure360 Conference Tuesday this week in St. Paul. Secure360 is one of the largest annual Information Security conferences in the Upper Midwest and is hosted at the River Center in Saint Paul. I heard there were approximately 1,600 attendees this year!
Presentations included in this year's two day conference included:
• Stealing Your Life: Identity Theft
• Keeping Up to Date in an Ever-Changing Security Landscape
• Medical Device Security: Infection Prevention
• Highway Traffic Engineering: A Study in Proactive Risk Management
• The psychology behind successful security awareness campaigns
• Business Continuity and Patient Safety for Healthcare
• Panel: Women in Security
• Social Engineering- Hacking the Human Element
• Obliterating the Line Between Computers and the Physical World
• Is There a Breach in Your Future?
• Hackers, Attack Anatomy & Security Trends
• Surviving the Incident Response Surge: Detecting and Investigating Incidents
• Mobile Device Data Breaches & Privacy Regulations
• Information-Centric & Security in the Cloud
I will update you early next week as to the events which transpire over the weekend.
Have a great weekend!
Sincerely,
Eric