'Full-Pipe' FBI Internet Monitoring Questionably Legal

CNet is running a piece looking at what they refer to as a 'questionably legal' internet surveillance technique being employed by the FBI. In situations where isolating a specific IP address for a suspect is not possible, the FBI has taken to 'full-pipe' surveillance: all activity for a bank of IPs is recorded, and then data mining is used to attempt to isolate their target. The questionable legality of this situation results from a requirement that, under federal law, the FBI is required to use 'minimization'. The article describes it this way: "Federal law says that agents must 'minimize the interception of communications not otherwise subject to interception' and keep the supervising judge informed of what's happening. Minimization is designed to provide at least a modicum of privacy by limiting police eavesdropping on innocuous conversations." Full-pipe surveillance would seem to abandon that principle in favor of getting to the target faster.

Comments

depends....

[Scudsucker]

If they only keep evidence found on the target (providing of course that they have a warrant of course) it might not be so bad. But somehow I doubt that will be the case though...say you and your neighbor both use municipal wireless, and your neighbor is into kiddie porn. The FBI collects all the traffic from your access point, and busts your neighbor for the kiddie porn - but also nails you for copyright infringment for downloading music or movies.

Re:Fair enough -- as long as they follow the rules

[Ctrl-Z]

This extends the police's right to examine a crime scene, only. They have to be looking for someone, for a particular case and anything they find is bound to the rules surrounding that action.

If you're doing something wrong, and they happen to catch you because they were looking for someone else -- then you shouldn't have been doing whatever it was you were doing.

That's fair. I agree that the summary is misleading, sensationalized even, but I don't agree that it is fair. I think a fair, if fictional, analogy in this case would be if police had a warrant to search a house in my neighbourhood looking for evidence of a crime, but since they only knew what block the house was on, they were permitted to search all the houses on my block. In that case, only evidence which actually applied to the crime being investigated should be usable. Suppose that I am a criminal, unrelated to the criminal activity that the police are investigating. They search my house and find some evidence that they weren't looking for. It doesn't seem fair for that evidence to be admissible in court, and I think they should require a new warrant to search for that evidence in a separate investigation. In that case, the investigators actually lose because I would have a chance to destroy the evidence before the second warrant is produced. In the Internet case, people don't even know when their traffic is being watched.

The rules don't change just because someone in your neighbourhood or netblock may have committed a crime that is being investigated by the FBI, and that is the danger here. Just because I'm not a criminal doesn't mean that I want authorities snooping through my garbage. I know we're already far down the slippery slope, but we need to hold on to whatever freedoms we have left.