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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.
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!
...because they resisted the NSA.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
You mean This?
...on catching terrorismists!
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?
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
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.
JACK: Take the number of vehicles in the field (A), multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average out-of-court settlement (C). A times B times C equals X... If X is less that the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
BUSINESS WOMAN: Are there a lot of these kinds of accident?
JACK: You wouldn't believe.
Bark less. Wag more.
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).
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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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
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.
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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.
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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.
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Very Well. I'll just have my people contact each other then. Have to keep them busy. --Fletch
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.