[iwar] [fc:Tap,.Tap,.Tap]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-06-03 13:21:56
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Wargaming.the.Asymmetric.Environment]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Search.for.Illicit.Activities.Taps.Confidential.Financial.Data]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
Message-Id: <200206032021.g53KLuR31773@red.all.net>
To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List)
Organization: I'm not allowed to say
From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com
Precedence: bulk
Date: Mon, 3 Jun 2002 13:21:56 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Tap,.Tap,.Tap]
Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Tap, Tap, Tap

Federal, state and local law enforcement agencies are still busily
wiretapping people, but there are a few surprises in the latest surveillance
stats.

By David Banisar Jun 02, 2002

Last month, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), after two years of
deliberations, reissued their revised regulations on the implementation of
the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) for setting
technical standards on wiretapping. The FCC had to issue the new regulations
after a U.S. Court of Appeals ordered them to do a better job -- an FCC
lawyer admitted in court that the extent of their analysis on privacy was a
little "hand wringing."

But in a bureaucratic masterstroke, the FCC managed to release essentially
the same regulations that were criticized by the court two years earlier.

For those of you not versed in now ancient history, CALEA was enacted in
1994 at the demand of the FBI, which claimed that new digital
telecommunications systems were going to be untappable, unless equipment
makers were forced by law to build easy-to-use wiretapping capabilities into
their systems.

Then FBI-director Louie Freeh got his buddy, the great net champion Senator
Leahy, to push CALEA through Congress for him with little fuss. The FCC was
given the role of moderating between the interests of law enforcement,
industry and privacy. Instead, they gave the FBI everything it demanded --
even wiretapping powers that were not in the statute -- and then the telecom
and privacy groups sued.

Now far be it for me to accuse the FBI of lying, but perhaps they were, as
the British phrase it, "economical with the truth." These many years later,
with telephony just about as digital as it's going to get, it seems that
federal and state governments are having no trouble conducting as much
wiretapping as they please -- even with the CALEA rules still not completed.

Last week, the Administration Office of the U.S. Courts released its annual
report that showed that federal and state use of wiretaps in criminal cases
increased 25 percent last year over 2000, and has reached yet another
all-time high of 1,491 taps.

Federal agencies only asked for a few more cases -- the increase was almost
all on the state side, where seven states (New York, California, Illinois,
New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Maryland) account for 93 percent of
all state wiretaps.

As with many of the previous years, no federal or state judge turned down a
request. There have only been about 30 cases in over 30 years where the
court has declined to allow a wiretap.

Targets: Cell Phones, Pagers
The war on drugs continued to be the major focus of government wiretapping.
In 2001, 87 percent (424 of the 486) requests by federal prosecutors were
for drug cases, up from 80 percent in 2000. Even after September 11, the
push for drugs cases continued. Of the 59 federal requests for wiretaps
after the attacks, all but eleven were drug cases.

In Arizona, just two days after September 11,prosecutors asked for a wiretap
on a drug case. I guess they forgot about the flight schools there also.
Only one wiretap request in NJ in 2001 was for terrorism.

And despite the FBI's 1994 fears, electronic and wireless communications are
apparently perfectly tappable, and, in fact, are the target de jour. Most of
the surveillance requests were for cell phones or digital pagers. (In the
past, homes and offices used to be the most popular target.)

But e-mail is still not very popular. There were only five requests by
federal prosecutors for digital interception of e-mail or electronic
communications in 2001. Pablo Escobar's heirs must have cancelled their AOL
accounts after getting too much spam.

The states did not make any requests for digital wiretaps in 2001, but that
does not include faxes or digital pagers, nor does it include using
Carnivore to intercept Web info using the easy-to-obtain pen register
statute.

Interestingly, there were 16 cases where encryption was encountered but in
all cases, the prosecutors said that the encryption did not prevent them
from obtaining the plain text of the communications. PGP, where are you?

The report doesn't include search warrants for stored electronic mail at
places like AOL, where the federal government is not required to report to
the public how many warrants they obtain nationally.

It also doesn't count national security taps under the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA), a point driven home by EPIC the other day with its
FOIA release about a botched Carnivore intercept in a terrorism
investigation.

A separate report earlier this year revealed the number of requests for
wiretaps for national security in 2001. The number dropped to 932, from
1,005 the year before. The wiretaps are approved by a Star Chamber-like
court of specially chosen judges based in the top floor of the Justice
Department's offices in D.C. They have only turned down one request in over
20 years. It's hard to tell what they are doing because the reports are only
a single paragraph, which has remained almost unchanged in 20 years except
for the year and number of orders that they rubber stamped.

The Justice Department says that they can now ask for fewer FISA orders
because they can merge the requests easier. Perhaps they just stopped
bothering to ask for them since they knew they can do what they please. The
only article of the Bill of Rights that Attorney General Ashcroft seems to
enforce these days is the 2nd Amendment.

It is interesting that even after September 11 the war on drugs still
appears to be the priority of many of the prosecutors, while the demands for
new surveillance powers were all couched in terms of saving us from
terrorists. Some day we may find out what they have been doing with these
powers. But don't count on it being from the FCC, or the courts.

David Banisar is a research fellow at the Harvard Information Infrastructure
Project at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and
Deputy-Director of Privacy International.

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Tied to your PC? Cut Loose and
Stay connected with Yahoo! Mobile
http://us.click.yahoo.com/QBCcSD/o1CEAA/sXBHAA/kgFolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

------------------
http://all.net/ 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Wargaming.the.Asymmetric.Environment]"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Search.for.Illicit.Activities.Taps.Confidential.Financial.Data]"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2003-08-24 02:46:32 PDT