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Comcast Charges $1000 Per Wiretap
It seems trashing the Fourth Amendment is very profitable:
For one company, FISA wiretaps carry a $1K pricetag
Comcast, which is among the nation's largest telecommunication companies, charges $1,000 to install a FISA wiretap and $750 for each additional month authorities want to keep an eye on suspects, according to the company's Handbook for Law Enforcement. Secrecy News obtained the document and published it Monday.
You mean This?
That is the price for a legal, court ordered wiretap.
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FISA has been around since 1978. How long have you been lamenting the descent?
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If it truly a FISA wiretap, than the authorities obtained a warrant from a judge. What Bush does with warrantless wiretaps are *not* FISA wiretaps because no warrants are involved.
Now, if you want to debate the Constitutionality of a FISA wiretap, that is a valid discussion, but the story does not even contain the word illegal anywhere. Read your own frakking article, and try to keep your story truthful.
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No. Comcast incurs costs for aiding investigations, therefore they need to recover those costs somehow. You can't expect them to just bite the bullet on the overhead of maintaining the systems needed to wiretap someone's internet connection or VOIP phone, dealing with the FBI, etc etc. It doesn't seem to me that Comcast is significantly altering their bottom line by charging a pittance $1000 for this, seems more like a cost of implementing and maintaining.
It's common practice for organizations to estimate the cost of an investigation post-facto in order to bill back the government. Comcast probably has a certain large percentage of such investigations that they figured it would easier to define an up front cost estimate other than generating that post-facto cost analysis.
Page 58 of http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/reports/FBI/a0613/final.pdf shows that $1K is pretty reasonable, depending on the type of wiretap. On page 56 of the report, it notes that $250 is typical for easy taps. However, the table on page 58 shows that $2200 is a lot more in line with certain types. Wiretapping is harder than it looks. The telecomm provider is typically responsible for making sure that the law enforcement agency (LEA) gets exactly what it is supposed to get, neither more nor less. They have to provide 24/7 support. In some cases, the LEA tries to prevent them from doing routine maintenance because doing things like rebooting switches drops taps. Depending on the particular type of tap, they're working for their $1000.
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I think a lot of people, including mr Aftergood, misunderstand the issue. The fact that there is a rate fee does not necessarily mean that it is such a common or even streamlined task. Ive been involved in this matter with an ISP in europe, where these things are already in law, and I think comcast is doing the right thing. By charging a fee, they make sure that there is at least some form of financial incentive for the police and/or justice department not to go overboard on wiretaps. And not only that, it can also be used to pay for the costs of the necessary infrastructure. This is not stuff you just buy at your local IT vendor, but needs to be implemented on a per-ISP bases in many cases. Wiretapping individual customers on 10 gbit meshed network with many redundant links is not trivial, especially if you want to make absolutely sure it holds up in court. The technology to do this is quite expensive, and needs to be paid by someone. In europe unfortunately most of the time that 'someone' is the ISP, and thus the customer. Governments have made wiretapping the financial responsibility of the ISP, which is really quite bad. Im glad to see Comcast was able to secure a payment from the government instead.
Now, this is ofcourse separate from the issue of the fact if these types of wiretaps should be allowed in the first place. In many cases that battle has already been fought, and lost. Expect big brother to watch, and expand its possibilities significantly. In europe, they're already talking about legal datamining in all the combined government and private sector databases,
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Cor
Actually, intercepting communications of American citizens is explicitly allowed in the Fourth Amendment, with a valid warrant. (That limitation doesn't even apply in the case of foreign communications - that's simply called espionage.) All that the Constitution requires for the issuance of a warrant is "probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized". As long as that criteria is fulfilled, then the warrant is valid.
There is no requirement that the warrant be public, nor are there strictly any constitutional requirements on who has to issue the warrant (although traditionally that is done by either a judge or a justice of the peace).
Moreover, the power to pass FISA is covered in the Constitution, Article III Section 1: "The judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish." Because the FISA court doesn't try either criminal or civil cases (it is limited to issuing warrants and reviewing classified materials, not conducting trials), there is no need to involve a jury, and no need to publicize any aspects of its actions.
Just because you don't like it doesn't mean that it is unconstitutional.