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FCC Demands Universities Comply With Wiretap Law
tabdelgawad writes "The New York Times reports that the FCC is requiring universities to upgrade their online systems to comply with the 1994 wiretap law, which would make it easier for law enforcement to monitor communications online. The universities are not objecting on civil rights grounds (the law requires a court order before monitoring), but on cost grounds (upgrades may cost $7 billion). But with the technology infrastructure in place, what happens if congress decides to relax court order requirements in the future 'in their fight against criminals, terrorists and spies?'"
So they have to pay lots of money and reduce their civil rights completly (I don't think any privacy laws are legally binding anymore...) It's got to stop. Unless the court order remains and is completly open, which isn't going to happen, this is just not acceptable. At least I live in Britain, which hasn't got all these civil rights reducing measures...quite yet.
Any grammatical or spelling errors above are for comic effect, and do not signify imperfection in the writer.
When I first read that headline I thought it said FCC Demands Universe Comply With Wiretap Law... Oddly, it didn't seem at all surprising.
But with the technology infrastructure in place, what happens if congress decides to relax court order requirements in the future 'in their fight against criminals, terrorists and spies?'
Every time a stroy likes this gets posted we don't complain about the facts we get cought up in "what if's"
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
Where's the fourth horseman? There are supposed to be four!
The federal government wants to make it more difficult for "criminals, terrorists and spies" by opening more backdoors in the system? Isn't that exactly the sort of thing that would make it easier for criminals, terrorists, and spies to get the info they need?
The ______ Agenda
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Colleges Protest Call to Upgrade Online Systems
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By SAM DILLON and STEPHEN LABATON
Published: October 23, 2005
The federal government, vastly extending the reach of an 11-year-old law, is requiring hundreds of universities, online communications companies and cities to overhaul their Internet computer networks to make it easier for law enforcement authorities to monitor e-mail and other online communications.
Related Site: Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (fcc.gov)
The action, which the government says is intended to help catch terrorists and other criminals, has unleashed protests and the threat of lawsuits from universities, which argue that it will cost them at least $7 billion while doing little to apprehend lawbreakers. Because the government would have to win court orders before undertaking surveillance, the universities are not raising civil liberties issues.
The order, issued by the Federal Communications Commission in August and first published in the Federal Register last week, extends the provisions of a 1994 wiretap law not only to universities, but also to libraries, airports providing wireless service and commercial Internet access providers.
It also applies to municipalities that provide Internet access to residents, be they rural towns or cities like Philadelphia and San Francisco, which have plans to build their own Net access networks.
So far, however, universities have been most vocal in their opposition.
The 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, requires telephone carriers to engineer their switching systems at their own cost so that federal agents can obtain easy surveillance access.
Recognizing the growth of Internet-based telephone and other communications, the order requires that organizations like universities providing Internet access also comply with the law by spring 2007.
The Justice Department requested the order last year, saying that new technologies like telephone service over the Internet were endangering law enforcement's ability to conduct wiretaps "in their fight against criminals, terrorists and spies."
Justice Department officials, who declined to comment for this article, said in their written comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission that the new requirements were necessary to keep the 1994 law "viable in the face of the monumental shift of the telecommunications industry" and to enable law enforcement to "accomplish its mission in the face of rapidly advancing technology."
The F.C.C. says it is considering whether to exempt educational institutions from some of the law's provisions, but it has not granted an extension for compliance.
Lawyers for the American Council on Education, the nation's largest association of universities and colleges, are preparing to appeal the order before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Terry W. Hartle, a senior vice president of the council, said Friday.
The Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit civil liberties group, has enlisted plaintiffs for a separate legal challenge, focusing on objections to government control over how organizations, including hundreds of private technology companies, design Internet systems, James X. Dempsey, the center's executive director, said Friday.
The universities do not question the government's right to use wiretaps to monitor terrorism or criminal suspects on college campuses, Mr. Hartle said, only the order's rapid timetable for compliance and extraordinary cost.
Technology experts retained by the schools estimated that it could cost universities at least $7 billion just to buy the Internet switches and routers necessary for compliance. That figure does not include installation or the costs of hiring and training staff to oversee the sophis
Wiretap orders are ex-parte. That is, only one party is present, and the judge, normally neutral, is expected to suddenly become a more active participant in the search for justice (like judges in civil/Napoleonic code type jurisdictions are), asking hard questions in place of the absent other party. Needless to say, a judge who normally acts in one paradigm (and indeed has no training in the other) isn't likely to suddenly change his stripes. Further, the police know full well which judges are likely to ask a question or two and which are likely to issue an order without question, so judge shopping inevitably occurs.
What percentage of search warrants and wiretap requests are denied? I challenge you to even find statistics about such things.
Parte on, dudes.
Everybody's a libertarian 'till their neighbour's becomes a crack house.
I already know that my university network isn't secure from fellow students, so basically what this does is allow law enforcement to sit on their asses from work and see what us kiddos are doing...when all they needed to do was walk their laptop over here and plug into the wall and they can do the same.
The solution is simple, and I do it myself. I SSH Tunnel all of my traffic out of my university to my off-site server so that I don't have to worry about an insecure network. I don't have any control over their policies and sniffing is very simple, even on a switched network.
When your ISP (the university) doesn't have your security in mind, then why should I trust them? And I have even more reason to now.
And I am not forgetting that the off-site server will soon have a similar back door made by my ISP. And when that happens, I might as well look for a server in NL.
_ _ _ _ _ _
Got Teeth?
http://www.doctorgallagher.com/
I'm on your side in this one, but honestly, how could you possibly think that "Well, they might decide to fuck us later" is a valid argument?
If it were, you wouldn't be allowed to do anything. Well, if I pay you for my groceries, you might just take the money and run, so I don't have to pay. But officer, if you arrest me, you might beat a confession out of me, so you're not allowed to arrest me.
No, congress isn't supposed to be allowed to fuck me over things I 'might' do, and the inverse applies too.
As technology facilitates eavesdropping and spying on each other, one may well assume that the only reasonable thing to do is to adopt a position of total openness of information for all, with nobody having any secrets to hide. The real question here is...If we were all wiretapped. How many of us would have things to hide?
Perhaps the US government in their infinite wisdom could devise some plan whereas they go about renetworking the entire internet through the FBI? After all, the US does own the world. Don't we?
Let's face it, an inefficient law-enforcement apparatus is the only reason we still have certain freedoms at all. The closer the government can get to truly universal surveillance (total tapping capability, cameras everywhere, biometrics and data-mining methods to handle the firehose of data), the closer we come to a police state that cannot be resisted. That's why the feds are leaning on Skype and other VOIP providers; currently, Skype can't be tapped.
The most dangerous weapon a criminal can carry is a badge.
I know it's not fair to editorialize in a story submission, though I'd probably do it again in this case.
The problem with your analogies is that Congress has a history of ignoring privacy rights when it suits them. Consider how fast the Patriot Act passed Congress. And consider the 'turbo' subpoenas of the DMCA.
I think it's good to have both technological and legal barriers to invasions of privacy. I don't want to live in a world where the government has the technological capability, if not the legal right, to monitor everyone's life at will.
Imposing Libertarian views on everyone online since 1992.
Why doesn't the FCC pay for it? I bet that will get them to have some common sense. I of course realise this means that the cost will still be the same or more. What it will also do is raise more congressional concern as the FCC will have to request that amount.
I waited three years for the C++ classes to become available at the local community college since the school didn't have the money to renew the Microsoft site license. (Java and Linux was taught during the meantime; not bad but job market for C++ programmers is a tad bit larger.) Now the Feds want the schools to upgrade the network infrastructure to find the next Neo in the Matrix. Oh, my gosh. I wonder which budget that little hardware upgrade is going to come from. Guess I'll be learning more Java at Starbucks when I graduate.
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US Universities have been especially anti-American since the '60s.
Of course, they don't mind that the government helps to pay their salaries.
What's to stop some would-be terrorist from simply encrypting his communications? He and his cohorts could probably use a one time pad so that even if older transmissions were tapped and the alleged terrorist captured, he'd be unable to disclose the old passwords to decode his old conversations.
Further, I imagine that it's possible to multiplex your voice signal with some other innocuous sound-transmission so that it would be impossible to tell if you were on actually on the line or not. Would-be wiretappers would hear nothing but slightly distorted Liza Minelli showtunes. Or am I wrong?
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
In 2004, court-ordered wiretaps increased by 19%. This number doesn't even include terror-related wiretaps (which number an unheard of 1,754). It also doesn't include so-called "secret" wiretaps, allowed by Patriot.
The only groups these wiretaps hurt are the law-abiding citizens. The smart (read: dangerous) criminals have it all figured out-- Prepaid cell phones.
Pre-paid cell phones are literally disposable, one-use toys to the bad guys. You don't even need a fake ID, just cash, and not all that much at that. How can they tap your phone when you use a different phone for each call? The best they could do is tap all the pre-paid phones and listen to every conversation out there -- good luck with that! (wanna bet the NSA is big into voice recognition?)
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Is is simply a case of looking for one's lost keys under the streetlight across the street, where you've not been, instead of down through the sewer grate you're standing over, just 'cause the light is better over there?
If they really want to start locally, I think they'd have more success bugging the phones and routers of the Congress and Executive branch, and posting the results on the web to further the cause of transparency and honesty in government. Nothing more would be required -- no investigations, no prosecutions, because we live in a nation with a free press and the freedom to vote our feeble minds.
Yes, let's bug every nook and cranny in the Capitol -- I believe we would root out a great many "criminals, terrorists and spies". It would not greatly surprise me to find Osama bin Laden living the good life in some Georgetown penthouse apartment.
"It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress." -- Mark Twain
Season Three If you can't get taps on the burners, just sell the crooks pre-tapped phones.
The government could make personal encryption illegal with the excuse that it means you have something to hide. (in their eyes) And they could go even further and make all software have a back door, so even though you have a SSH tunnel, the law enforcement can use their back door and login to your application layer, or maybe even go as far as even the operating system layer. Technically, because they make the laws, they could require full access into the hardware level of the computer. If they want to see what you are sending, they can just look at the actual bits read from the hard drive, or the pixels displayed by the graphics card. There is no way around it, our rights are going down the toilet. Combined with the lawsuits from the big businesses nowadays, all they have to say is he stole from me, and then they get a tap warrant and you don't even know that they are monitoring you. Thats the worst kind of security breech out there, the kind that is totally invisible to you...until it is too late.
You've probably spent much more time in engineering/sciences than in the humanities. Five minutes with the students and faculty in the Philosphy, Sociology, Anthropology, or History departments and you'll find out how deep the Anti-Americanism runs.
I'm not an american but I am a university student, and I'll take a solid semester of humanities brainwashing over 5 minutes of business/marketing bullcrap. I took a CS/Admin class (CS270-Information Systems Management--It's a prerequisite for CS271-COBOL) and I swear it dropped my IQ by like 2 points alone. Five minutes with the students and faculty in Marketing or Administration will make you wish you were instead surrounded by pot smoking hippie communist liberals.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I hate to break it to you, but just because 60% or 90% or even 99% of people don't want to own an Atomic Bomb doesn't mean banning Atomic Bombs for the 1% that do isn't a violation of a civil liberty. The US mentality and laws about guns is dominated by sheer stupidity. Banning guns and bombs has nothing to do with civil liberties, but with having a society where people don't kill each other as easily, either by mistake or by intent. If you need a handgun for shooting at a club or because you're a hunter, apply for it.