Higher Education Fears Wiretapping Law

alphadogg writes "Institutions of higher education are up in arms over an FCC ruling on wiretapping they say could cost them billions of dollars in upgrades, expose their networks to more attacks, and jeopardize rights to privacy and freedom of speech. "

Comments

Lots of FUD in this article

[dmci]

My understanding is the most recent rulemaking by the FCC states that colleges and universities would only need to provide the "wiretap" capability for traffic going to and from the campus and the Internet. As such, a wholesale replacement of all routers and switches on campus would not be necessary; most likely some edge equipment and possibly some VLAN switching.

Of course, the cost complaint ignores the ongoing privacy versus security debate.

In any event, there is an excellent resource for higher education's position on this issue at EDUCAUSE. See http://www.educause.edu/calea

Summary should emphasize "could"

[Kainaw]

If you RTFA, the FCC ruling was expanded to ISP's. Universities are concerned that they may legally fit in the legal definition of an ISP. If so, then they would have to obey the same laws as, say AOL and MSN. If that happens and the FBI is investigating, say, someone on campus who with a child porn website, the University would be required to give the FBI access to the network to monitor traffic if a subpoena is granted for a tap. So, all in all, the Universities want to provide broadband internet service for all students, but not be classified as providers of internet service.

Re:Summary should emphasize "could"

[Kadin2048]

The way I read it is that whoever is providing the University's connection to the rest of the internet has to support CALEA, but the University does not have to on its internal network. So the gateway to the 'net has to be tappable, but a connection that stays on the internal network and never strays out onto the Internet itself doesn't have to be.

That was my reading, although I suppose there could be other interpretations.

Where I went to school last, Internet service was provided to the campus by commercial telcos via leased lines, so it would be that telco that had to comply with CALEA, not the school itself. The network edges were pretty defined, and if you went down into the right basement you could basically find a box that was the "gateway" to each ISP's connection. What I'm not sure about would be a school where the definition between "local network" and "internet" was more vague; schools that have multiple campuses or locations but all using a single block of IPs could be argued to fit into either category. Also, I'm not clear how the networks at some larger universities (the ones that originally comprised the Internet) work. What if your connection to the Internet isn't through an ISP but just via a connection to another university on a leased line? What then, are they an ISP?

I think you'll need to find a different argument.

[Kadin2048]

You are aware, I hope, that during a significant number of those conflicts we lost a lot more of our freedoms than we are currently discussing even the potential of losing right now...

I'm not defending the current administration's policies, but I just think that you should be careful drawing historical comparisons before you know where they're going. President Lincoln -- who history has treated quite favorably -- declared and imposed martial law, suspended habeas corpus, and arrested people that today would probably be termed "political dissidents," including a few members of Congress. (The anti-war Democrats known as the "Copperheads" were the common target.)

When the arrests and courts-martial were declared blatantly unconstitutional by the Supreme Court (under Taney), Lincoln simply ignored the ruling until the conclusion of the war. You can Google this, just type in "John Merryman" or check out Ex parte Merryman (the ruling that was ignored).

That's one of the more well-known and egregious violations, but there are others; the persecution of the Germans in World War I, the Japanese in World War II, and a host of other things, any of which can and were argued to be necessary at the time owing to extenuating circumstances.

So by drawing a historical parallel between 9/11 and any other "war period" in our history, you can quite easily play into the hands of a pro-oppression argument, because there is ample historical evidence for periods of relative oppression (or at least, of substantially reduced civil liberties) during conflicts, followed by a return to normalcy afterwards.

Re:Looking on the bright side...

[Yartrebo]

Terrorism is not a valid reason. There wasn't a single instance of international terrorism in the US last year. Since 2000, less than 4,000 people have died in the US from terrorism, almost all in a single easily preventable event.

Giving a generous 4,000 deaths to terrorism over the last 6 years (generous because there are many plausible theories about 9/11, not all of which rely on Islamic terrorists), it works out to 667 per year.

According to wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaths#Causes_of_dea th_in_the_US), terrorism doesn't even make it onto the list. The leading cause of death, heart disease, kills about 1,000 times as many people. Murder, itself a rare event, kills over 20 times as many people.

If one wanted to save lives, then there are many, many better ways to go about it. Saving one death due to terrorism has a price tag around $1,000,000,000 and comes with massive losses of civil liberties. Preventing a death due to heart disease or lung cancer costs maybe a few thousand in anti-smoking programs and has very tiny (and entirely voluntary) effects on civil liberties.

Government waste alone probably kills more than 1 person per $1,000,000,000, via a reduced standard of living.

Take the security concerns seriously

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

politics hat off)
(infosec hat on)

There was a recent scandal in Greece about massive eavesdropping. Many government phone calls were getting involuntarily "conferenced" to multiple prepaid cellular phones. Nobody's caught the perpetrators.

This was done with the "lawful intercept" feature of the telco switching equipment. Depending on the nature of the phone calls it might have been a national security issue.

"Lawful intercept" is a huge security bypass. Bad guys will be highly motivated to exploit it. They won't have to breach physical security either, because CALEA (if memory serves) requires the ISP to offer law enforcemnt remote access.

The threat model also has to include unauthorized users at the law enforcement agency ("Hey, what's this sticky note on the monitor at the CALEA terminal?"). Next worry about the law enforcemnt officer with a personal agenda, e.g. a stalker. Then consider the amount of money in computer crime these days, and ask whether the CALEA operators will be the first incorrutible cops in history. Then reread _The Art of Deception_ and imagine what the next Kevin Mitnick could get the police to do.

That's off the top of my head. For a client I'd get really paranoid :-)

Re:I think you'll need to find a different argumen

[StikyPad]

The differences are the methods used, the reasoning behind them, and the expected duration they are/were imposed. Lincoln, for example, realized that his actions were wholly irregular and should be but a temporary imposition.

Clockwurk did a much better job of comparing the two than I could ever hope to do:

[A]s Lincoln showed during the Civil War, there may be times of military emergency where the executive believes it imperative to take immediate, highly irregular, even unconstitutional steps. "I felt that measures, otherwise unconstitutional, might become lawful," Lincoln wrote in 1864, "by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the Constitution, through the preservation of the nation." Bush seems to think that, since 9/11, he has been placed, by the grace of God, in the same kind of situation Lincoln faced. But Lincoln, under pressure of daily combat on American soil against fellow Americans, did not operate in secret, as Bush has. He did not claim, as Bush has, that his emergency actions were wholly regular and constitutional as well as necessary; Lincoln sought and received Congressional authorization for his suspension of habeas corpus in 1863. Nor did Lincoln act under the amorphous cover of a "war on terror" -- a war against a tactic, not a specific nation or political entity, which could last as long as any president deems the tactic a threat to national security. Lincoln's exceptional measures were intended to survive only as long as the Confederacy was in rebellion. Bush's could be extended indefinitely, as the president sees fit, permanently endangering rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution to the citizenry. http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=184448&cid =15229298

(Mod me underrated if you want to mod this post up; I don't want to karma whore off of someone else's work.)