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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.
On one hand, I find FISA absolutely disgusting and weep as our mighty country has fallen into tyranny and darkness.
On the other hand, I really hate Comcast even more now. They're allowed to charge for this? What the hell *is* that?
If I get pulled over by an officer for speeding, can I send his department a bill for the time of mine he used up while writing me a ticket?
With all the crap we customers are putting up with (constant rate increases, lousy service, high prices, lack of privacy, ridiculous usage filtering), the only way Comcrap is going to lose customers is if there is some sort of competition.
Currently, they have, essentially, a monopoly in most areas. In my neighborhood, DSL only became available recently and really only through SBC (hiding behind the AT&T name). The "service" is an 1/8th of the speed for barely any less monthly rate.
Believe me, if there was any way to get decent internet without paying Comcrap for it, I'd be doing it. And I'm sure a LOT of other folks would, too.
Jory
Correct. If these were "Patriot Act" taps outside FISA, then the term 'illegal' *might* could be used, in quotes. A bit of sensationalizing that Taco let through. Still, a nice payday for Comcast.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Actually, you are way off base, for several reasons.
Yes, you are protected against unreasonable searches and seizures, but the presumption is that because a warrant is only issued by a judge "upon probable cause", a search based on that warrant is not unreasonable, because it is "supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized", and there are penalties for perjury.
There is also nothing in the Fourth Amendment that requires that you be informed of a warrant issued against you before it is carried out (in fact, if you were notified of a wiretap warrant, the wiretap would be completely useless, regardless of whether the court that issued it was a "secret court" or not).
Finally, what does the "right to a fair trial by jury of your peers" have to do with warrants and wiretaps? Warrants and wiretaps are used prior to the trial to gather evidence. The trial is when it is presented to the judge and jury. In fact, the FISA court does not hear criminal cases. It only handles matters like issuing warrants and reviewing of classified information.
So, where is any of that a violation of the Constitution?
> "Without pay, I would bet the lag time would be long.. As a private company with a task to perform, the unpaid task would be bottom priority like most of their coustomer service requests."
Always follow the money ...
Or in this case, "there's no whore like an old whore ..." (f*cking your customers for $1k + $750/m, like Comcast customers aren't already screwed enough ...)
No one has yet given legitimate reason as to why FISA-court ordered wiretaps are unconstitutional.
$400/year cell phone bill? Sounds like a great deal!
I think the simple fact that the court can't issue a blanket warrant covers this fairly well. The constitutional protection essentially means they can't go house to house looking for stuff. How flimsy their probable cause is isn't really built into the constitution.
How is that any different than any other court where testimony, evidence, or filings are sealed from public examination? All of those have been upheld as Constitutional for quite some time.
FISA can be argued either way. Not giving a personal opinion here, but at least it *is* a court, of sorts, that a warrant is issued from (per 4th). It also seems to have passed some review. Searches under the Patriot Act without any warrant are considerably easier to argue as illegal or at least unconstitutional in any circumstance. Patriot Act searches aren't enjoying the same success in court as FISA searches.
Regardless of anyone's opinion of FISA, it is still vastly superior to warrentless searches being conducted under the guise of the Patriot Act.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
It's a good question, but I can think of two related reasons.
Ordinary citizens don't get compensated for their trouble in complying with a court order. Maybe they ought to be, but they aren't. The companies are getting special treatment here.
Now if the government doesn't have to compensate somebody, should we be concerned if (apparently) out of the goodness of their heart they find the money to do so? I'd say we should at least be concerned. An internal FBI audit of only 10% of the agency's uses of its "National Security Letter" powers over the course of several years found literally thousands of instances where telecomm companies improperly furnished the agency with personal information about their subscribers. In other words the companies and feds routinely cooperate in ways that are designed to evade legal scrutiny, although we can choose to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume the motivation was convenience rather than outright lawbreaking.
Add the fact that the telcos were paid for this and you have a cozy -- and improper -- special arrangement the telecomm companies have with the Feds. If you step back and squint, it's hard to distinguish it from a system in which the secret police use a combination of threats and bribes to set set citizens spying upon each other. That's bad. It should be incontestable that when your bank or your phone company opens up your private life to the police, it is based on probable cause and validated by an independent and competent legal authority.
Contrary to common belief, there is no fourth amendment protection for personal information that is held by third parties, unless those parties have a special fiduciary relationship to you. This means you have no constitutional protection at all for any information you must divulge to a third party in order to communicate. We ought to, but we don't. It just wasn't part of the world the framers lived in. All we have between us and intolerable levels of government intrusion into our private affairs is a thin veil of statutory law which is supposed to cover over the holes in the Bill of Rights.
People probably should be compensated for cooperating with federal agents in their investigations; but until the feds can be constrained to act within the law, it's a good thing that cooperatng with them is a nuisance. I don't have a problem with paid snitches in general, but when organizations to whom we must entrust personal information on a large scale become paid snitches, we don't have any privacy safety net. The companies aren't going to complain because they're getting paid; the feds aren't going to complain because doing so admits they were breaking the law. And you aren't going to complain because you won't know until it is too late.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I agree. You only have to listen to the rhetoric spouted by Bush and Congress to know what they are doing is illegal. First, they tell us that nothing the phone companies have done is illegal and they have acted in "good faith". Then, they tell us because the phone companies, and this includes Comcast, have been so helpful, that they should be granted immunity from their actions retroactive back to 2001. It doesn't take Einstein to figure out that if they had done nothing wrong, then there would be no reason to grant immunity. The fact that they are asking for it means they know they acted irresponsibly with their customer's info, and illegally.
The fact that Comcast also makes money off of these wiretaps is outrageous. That's incentive for them to keep violating the Fourth Amendment whenever asked by the government, regardless of legal grounds to do so.
Scientists now say the future will be far more futuristic than originally believed
Really? Why? The FBI now issues 30,000 National Security Letters per year. We obviously don't know who they are issued about, but it is not out of the question for a large Internet vendor to handle hundreds, or even thousands of letters.
Secondly, calling what they'd need to put in place "wiretapping infrastructure" is an exaggeration. Everything they need is already in place for normal network operation and management: mail and proxy logs, traffic analysis facilities etc. They already know who the P2P bandwidth hogs are so they can tweak the header bits on BitTorrent traffic. Even mirroring all the packets to or from a particular IP address to a certain destination is a feature that many network switches offer for debugging. I agree they don't make money on (to pick a figure out of the air) a dozen or so NSL's, but their costs aren't engineering costs, its the administrative and legal costs of deciding to comply.
However, let's take your figures at a starting point. Let's imagine that they spent a million dollars to put a new infrastructure in to comply with a dozen FBI requests. What else does that infrastructure do for them? Nothing. The incentive is to encourage the FBI to make more requests; surely the marginal cost of using the system isn't $1000. The more Comcast spies on its customers, the closer it is to recouping that cost. If they can get the FBI to send 1000 of the 30,000 NSL demands their way, they've recouped their cost. Maybe a bit more if procesisng each order costs a couple of hundred.
The harder it is to prepare to comply to the first request, the more incentive there is to look the other way if the subsequent requests aren't quite right.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
It's different when your company is being subpoenaed for something relating to a crime they committed. However this is a case where the company in question isn't accused of a crime at all, they are being ordered to help investigate one. Ok fine, but you can't very well say they should have to do that for free, especially if they have to do it often. The police and courts can't just say "This related to a criminal investigation, we get everything for free."
I mean consider another case: Suppose the cops suspect your neighbour of doing something evil. They want to investigate this further, and it turns out that your house would provide an ideal surveillance location. Should they be allowed to just barge in and demand to use it for free? Of course not, doesn't matter that it is related to a crime, it isn't related to you at all. However they could certainly ask you if you'd let them use your house and perhaps there'd be money involved in that.
If you look at state laws you'll generally find statutes specifically saying that 3rd parties involved in subpoenas shall be reimbursed for their costs related to that. It is just a necessity, otherwise these companies would fight and probably win. As it is, if they are well paid for the costs, they lose the ability to argue about it. You can't very well say it's too expensive for you to do if they are paying you for it.