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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.
posted before?
It talks about FISA-court approved wiretaps ... how come the title says illegal?
After announcing this, they notified the black market that it would be $2,000.00 a month to notify people being illegally tapped that they were being illegally tapped.
When confronted by the govt, they let them know that secrecy, much like their internet connection uptime, is in no way guaranteed under the current terms.
For guaranteed privacy, it is $5,000.00 per month. However, if they only listen on nights and weekends, the fee is slightly reduced.
Talk about creating shareholder value!
I've got a short list of people for whom I'd cheerfully pay $1000 to get a wiretap transcript on. Let's see, Dick Cheney, Mr. Justice Clarence Thomas...
I piss off bigots.
...because they resisted the NSA.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
...on catching terrorismists!
That is the price for a legal, court ordered wiretap.
Test your net with Netalyzr
FISA has been around since 1978. How long have you been lamenting the descent?
The opposite of progress is congress
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.
"Useless organic meatbag" -HK-47
So this is like when Ford decided that if each Pinto that exploded cost them less than 11 million USD in lawsuits, it was still worth producing the cars?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
If you would like to tap my internet and phones, I can cut out the middle man and give you what you need for a one-time setup cost of $600, and the low low price of $450 per month.
(Now, if the monitoring program is secret, what can the IRS do if I don't report that income?)
They are dealing with the Federal government. It may cost $990 to do the papaerwork.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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
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.
> "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 ...)
Modeled after all those movies on clandestine, stalker boyfriend movies... the illegal wiretap must be done as follows:
1. Buy a white utility van. Buy a blue -not black- uniform so no one can see you under the streetlight. Your company name should have pizza or florist in it.
2. Climb utility pole. Connect phone line to your headphones. Its not more technical than this. Now you hear all the phone conversations.
3. ????
4. Profit!!!
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).
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!
Best line from the article:
"I was actually surprised that this was such a routine transaction that it would have a set fee," said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy.
Two things that I find strange. First, take this out of the context of FISA. If a state prosecutor, say, subpoenas records from a private business, do they routinely pay said business for the processing? Generally speaking, it seems that when a court orders something, you don't get paid for the time or effort. Even if you hire a lawyer to handle the subpoena process you don't get reimbursed for that. Maybe someone with some inside knowledge can fill me in here, but wouldn't you have to file a petition to have any processing costs refunded?
Second thing that's a little quirky, why is there a maintenance fee? Why is there an initial cost? I wouldn't think that it's Comcast's own techs doing the surveillance. After all, when phone lines are tapped Verizon guys don't do the tapping. Is it to compensate for lost bandwidth? Doesn't seem likely. Again, if someone knows better, please fill me in, but it seems a bit strange that Comcast is able to charge money to allow the government to perform court-ordered surveillance.
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Commie-castic !!
There a discount package on illegal wire tapping if you sign up for the Big Brother Deluxe Program
Its not the years, its the mileage
The phone companies must love criminals then, this is probably ~10 months or so bills per month, nice. That is why I mention Al Queda and Jihad in every phone call, I want to run up the FBI/NSA bill :)
What in there prohibits a "secret court"?
Moreover, where are courts required to publish a public record of all warrants issued, especially for wiretaps? Last i checked, the entire point ofa wiretap is that the person being tapped doesn't know about it.
75 year old takes a hammer to Comcast.
Who is RTFM and when will he help me with Unix?
[quote] Three or four unaccountable people say so is no "reasonable" grounds for a search in a real democracy. [/quote] Do you really know enough about US law to make a claim about US law? Let's put this in another context. 4 of your neighbors call the police and say they believe your running drugs out of your house due to the mass amounts of traffic to and from your house thru the day. That right there is enough for a search warrent (and those statements didn't even come from law enforcement officials), it will lead to a RAID (sp?) if the police already suspected this. This happened 2 times (first was the warrent, second was the raid) to the house across the street from my home, which is how I know this can, and does, happen.
This is Slashdot! Give me the latest gadget, bug, or OS project! This ain't english class so don't confuse the two!
This is Slashdot! Give me the latest gadget, bug, or OS project! This ain't english class so don't confuse the two!
Well, shit. For $1,000 I'd tap my own line!
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
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.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
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,
make your vote count,
Cor
Do you have any friends that are cops? Ever been pulled over by him while you were drunk and speeding? I don't have any friends that are cops, but I did get pulled over for Drunk Driving going 55 in a school zone. You know what it took me to get out of that ticket? My hair cut and a USMC ID. I think it would have taken less had the cop been my personal friend. So I'll trust when you can prove what happens all the time, doesn't.
This is Slashdot! Give me the latest gadget, bug, or OS project! This ain't english class so don't confuse the two!
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
You pay comcast to spy on you. Then you pay the government to get the information from comcast, so that they can take away our rights to not be spied on.
Maybe we should cutout the middleman. Comcast can discount their fees, and then the government can pay us to spy on ourselves.
-------
Very Well. I'll just have my people contact each other then. Have to keep them busy. --Fletch
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.
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.
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.