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.

Comments

Re:illegal?

[grylnsmn]

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?

Re:Well, hrm.

[syzler]

On the other hand, I really hate Comcast even more now. They're allowed to charge for this? What the hell *is* that?

Believe it or not, Comcast charging the government is in your best interest. This puts a price tag on frivolous subpoenas which discourages the government from issuing broad subpoenas. This also discourages subpoenas for multiple wiretaps to be maintained indefinitely (even law enforcement must work within a budget).

An ISP with which I am familiar often provides law enforcement with a quote of the cost to fullfill subpoenas they felt were too broad or would require a significant amount of man hours (Uhmm, CPU time) to produce the requested information. Almost invariably this resulted in law enforcement reducing the scope of the subpoena in question (I.E. information about less individuals was disclosed) or they completely rescinded the subpoena.

So whether you agree that Comcast should be able to make a small profit on wiretaps, they are providing an additional layer of checks and balances to our government.
 
Additionally, why should the Comcast subscribers foot the bill for a public service (Note that I am not a Comcast subscriber).

Re:Why should they do it for free?

[hey!]

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.

Re:Let's Look at the Fourth Amendment!

[funkyloki]

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.