OBAMA Admin. WANTS WIRETAPS ON THE INTERNET

Web Wiretaps Raise Security, Privacy Concerns

by Martin Kaste
All Things Considered


February 22, 2011

In the old days, wiretapping was easy: Law enforcement officials just tapped a wire. Even with cell phones, police merely had to take a warrant to the phone company and tell it to tap the number.

But now, in this age of Skype and instant messaging, things are a lot trickier, and law enforcement says it needs help.

Federal law already requires tech companies to cooperate with court-ordered surveillance. The problem, says FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni, is that the companies offering services like Web-based e-mail or social networking sometimes can't cooperate.

"What we're finding — and it's not universally the case, across the board — but what we're seeing is they do not have intercept solutions available for all of the types of services that they're offering for people to use to communicate," she says.

Seeking An 'Intercept Solution' For Internet Communications

In 1994, Congress passed a law requiring the new cell phone networks to provide "intercept solutions," as Caproni puts it. Now, the Obama administration wants a similar requirement for communications systems on the Internet.

The FBI, the Commerce Department and the various spy agencies have been meeting for months to discuss possible legislation, and last week there was a preliminary hearing on the subject in the House of Representatives.

"It was a very weird hearing," says computer engineer Susan Landau, who testified.

She says it was hard to offer analysis because the administration is being vague: "They just haven't detailed their problems."

For instance, the FBI won't specify which Internet systems are at issue because it says it doesn't want to advertise its blind spots.

Landau, who specialized in Internet security at Sun Microsystems, says she is convinced that there are problems "on occasion," but it's hard to know how severe they are.

Downsides To A Cure

Whatever the extent of law enforcement's problem, she says, the cure may be worse.

Landau wrote a book called Surveillance or Security? The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies, which argues that built-in eavesdropping systems can open computers up to non-government spying. And the danger isn't just hypothetical. She points to a case in Greece in which software meant for lawful eavesdropping on the cell phone system allowed somebody to spy on the prime minister and other officials.

"Somebody went into the switch and wiretapped these 100 senior officials for a period of 10 months," Landau says. "It was discovered when a text message went awry, and quickly stopped. But we still to this day don't know who did it."

The Threat Of Hacking

She says imagine the vulnerabilities that would be created if similar back doors were required on all e-mail services or social networks. It's an argument that resonates in Washington, as evidence mounts that the government and American industry have been targets of persistent and effective hacking attacks from overseas.

And then there's the problem of the Internet's decentralization. It's one thing to regulate a handful of phone companies, but when it comes to all the different ways to chat online, it's hard even to keep track of them all. And some services aren't even run by companies.

Finding Anonymity Online

The Tor project helps to "anonymize people and to keep them safe and private on the Internet," says Jacob Appelbaum, a developer for the project.

Tor's encryption system has been used by everybody from the U.S. military to WikiLeaks. Appelbaum's involvement with Tor earned him close government scrutiny. And that's one reason he now works as a computer researcher at the University of Washington's computer science and engineering department. He hopes the job will give him a little extra legal cover.

Appelbaum says if the government ever told him to build an eavesdropping function into Tor, he would refuse.

"Oh, I mean, I would leave the country," he says. "I would not be in a country that was so hostile to people having personal autonomy and liberty."

It may not come to that: Caproni says the administration is trying to find what she calls "an 80 percent solution" — something that facilitates government access to most online communication, but not necessarily all of it.

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Bullfrog44 said:

You think O doesn't know what he is doing? LOL. Listen to the guys acceptance speech again and tell me he wasn't planning this from the beginning. The guy is a socialist. Just don't vote for him again unless you don't even want to recognize the USA in four more years.

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Phillthy said:

that article is a year old.

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Obama Administration Asks Supreme Court to Dismiss ACLU Challenge to Warrantless Wiretapping Law

February 17, 2012

ACLU Argues Dragnet Surveillance of Americans Is Unconstitutional

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: (212) 549-2666; media@aclu.org

NEW YORK – The government today asked the Supreme Court to overturn an appeals court ruling that allowed the American Civil Liberties Union to challenge the constitutionality of a law that gives the government unprecedented authority to monitor international emails and phone calls by Americans.

At issue is an appeals court ruling that allowed the ACLU’s case to move forward. It rebuffed Obama administration arguments that the case should be dismissed because the ACLU’s clients cannot prove their communications will be collected under the law, known as the FISA Amendments Act. The ACLU said it was disappointed by today’s request.

“The appeals court correctly ruled that our plaintiffs have standing to challenge this sweeping surveillance law, and it’s disappointing that the administration is challenging that ruling,” said Jameel Jaffer, ACLU deputy legal director. “It’s crucial that the government’s surveillance activities be subject to constitutional limits, but the administration’s argument would effectively insulate the most intrusive surveillance programs from judicial review. The Supreme Court should leave the appeals court’s ruling in place and allow our constitutional challenge to proceed.”

The ACLU filed the lawsuit in July 2008 on behalf of a broad group of attorneys and human rights, labor, legal and media organizations whose work requires them to engage in sensitive telephone and email communications with people outside the U.S. such as colleagues, clients, sources, foreign officials and victims of human rights abuses. The coalition includes Amnesty International USA, Human Rights Watch, The Nation, the Service Employees International Union and journalists Chris Hedges and Naomi Klein. The Justice Department claims that the plaintiffs should not be able to sue without first showing that they have, in fact, been monitored under the program – information that the government refuses to provide.

In March 2011, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the plaintiffs do, in fact, have the right to challenge the constitutionality of the law. In September, the full Second Circuit rejected the government’s request for reconsideration of that ruling.

“The FISA Amendments Act is the most sweeping surveillance statute ever enacted by Congress. It allows dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications with none of the safeguards that the Constitution requires. This kind of law should not be shielded from judicial scrutiny,” said Alex Abdo, staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project.

Little is known about how the FISA Amendments Act has been used. In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the government revealed that every six-month review of the Act had identified “compliance incidents,” suggesting either an inability or an unwillingness to properly safeguard Americans’ privacy rights. The government has withheld the details of those “compliance incidents,” however, including statistics relating to abuses of the Act.

The Act is scheduled to sunset in December 2012. The ACLU is calling for amendments that would limit surveillance to suspected terrorists and criminals, require the government to be more transparent about how the law is being used and place stronger restrictions on the retention and dissemination of information that is collected.

Attorneys on the lawsuit challenging the FISA Amendments Act are Jaffer and Abdo of the ACLU; Christopher Dunn and Melissa Goodman of the New York Civil Liberties Union; and Charles S. Sims, Theodore K. Cheng and Matthew J. Morris of Proskauer Rose LLP.

More information on the ACLU’s lawsuit challenging the law: www.aclu.org/national-security/amnesty-et-al-v-clapper

More information on the ACLU’s FOIA lawsuit: www.aclu.org/fixFISA

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