US Gov't Assisted Iranian Gov't Mobile Wiretaps

bdsesq sent in a story on Ars Technica highlighting how the US government's drive for security back doors has enabled the Iranian government to spy on its citizens. "For instance, TKTK was lambasted last year for selling telecom equipment to Iran that included the ability to wiretap mobile phones at will. Lost in that uproar was the fact that sophisticated wiretapping capabilities became standard issue for technology thanks to the US government's CALEA rules that require all phone systems, and now broadband systems, to include these capabilities."

Comments

Double Standard

[MetalliQaZ]

Can you believe that the story features alarming reactions to Iran being able to spy on its citizens, without worrying that the US is doing the same thing. There is an implication with this /. post that the technology wasn't dangerous until it fell into Iran's hands. The US isn't guilty of enabling Iran. The US is guilty of intrusive policy.

-d

Re:Double Standard

[Lunix Nutcase]

The US isn't guilty of enabling Iran. The US is guilty of intrusive policy.

No, it's actually guilty of both. Iran wouldn't have this capability without the intrusive policy pushed by the government.

Re:Double Standard

[MetalliQaZ]

Why stop at wiretapping equipment? Without the efforts of the US, Iran wouldn't have F-14 Tomcats either.

Re:Double Standard

[amicusNYCL]

Or a nuclear research reactor in Tehran, for that matter.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehran_Research_Reactor#Tehran

Re:This.

[Lunix Nutcase]

It's not that we don't trust our government

You would be wrong.

Re:This.

[cheekyjohnson]

"It's not that we don't trust our government"

That's wrong. I don't trust any government with that kind of power. It will be abused, and I'll do everything in my power (what little I have) to prevent them from getting such a power.

Re:Wait, what ?

[WrongSizeGlass]

The title is very misleading ... it should read "Iranian Gov Uses Telecom Backdoors Required By US Gov"

Re:This.

[Anonymusing]

This is the biggest reason why we fight against greater wiretap rules in the U.S.

Ummm... no. The biggest reason we fight wiretaps is because they are wrong.

Letting the tech get into the hands of other governments is a far, far secondary reason. Maybe tertiary...quaternary... hexadenary... it's way down the list, anyway.

Unfair to just put the blame on the US

[linumax]

I'm Iranian and I'm very pissed off about the regime abusing the the technology, however, I can't put all the blame on the US government. A lot of the tracking/wiretapping tech (well, virtually any technology) have dual uses. For example, if a family member of mine gets kidnapped I'd like the police to be able to locate him/her easily by tracking a cellphone. Or if a bunch of suspects are doing something against the law and there's justified need to tap their phones and/or internet I'd like the police to be able to obtain a warrant and have access to the technology to do their job. So it's not funding the development of technology or requiring it's inclusion in the products that is the problem.

Now, if the US had the ability to prevent the regime from accessing the tech and they didn't do anything about it, well, that's not really nice.

Re:Unfair to just put the blame on the US

[Lunix Nutcase]

The fault lies squarely with the manufacturers of the equipment.

The fault lies with the people who were forced by the US government to put backdoors into their products so that the government can spy on people? lolwut?

Re:Wait, what ?

[StikyPad]

It's not misleading; it's the headline's purpose to get straight to the author's point, and the point is that the unintended consequence of our domestic policies has been to enable authoritarian regimes to enforce policies of their own.

Re:Wait, what ?

[Pojut]

One man's misleading headline is another man's truth. Interesting, that.

Re:Meh

[EdZ]

Those were all you guys?! Man, dick move America.

Re:Meh

[Anonymous Coward]

What's next? Are we going to get blamed for fast food? The Olsen twins? NBC 'Must See' TV?

I don't know about being blamed for everything, the USA can be blamed for quite a few nasty things, you don't get to be a superpower without doing nasty things, it comes with the territory and so does being blamed for it. As for the rest of your comment: yes, yes and yes.

Increasingly Tyrannical Rule & Imperial Arroga

[Apple Acolyte]

A very interesting story. I wasn't aware of this CALEA law until I just read about it in a previous story in Slashdot, and it's very disturbing that the increasingly tyrannical rule (albeit a mostly soft tyranny for the time being) of the US Federal government and it's concomitant level of imperial arrogance has supposedly endowed an even more evil regime to further terrorize the world. If the US made Ahmadinejad's (YM"SH) life easier, government officials should be prosecuted and punished under the anti-treason provisions of the Constitution, but then again that can be said about many aspects of the US's ruling elite.

We must strenuously oppose any more encroachments on liberty and privacy, including the latest attempts by the Barack Hussein Obama regime to mandate backdoors in nearly all communication devices. This is a far more severe threat to our lives than ACTA. I can live without secular entertainment, but I don't want to live in a perpetual police state. We have to be mindful of the possibility that multi-national tyrannical forces are coordinating their efforts to bring a form of superlative form of international fascism (think 1984) in which all of humanity is shackled and enslaved.

Call me an alarmist if you wish - I am very alarmed.

Re:This.

[amicusNYCL]

This is the biggest reason why we fight against greater wiretap rules in the U.S. It's not that we don't trust our government

Uh, no, I'm pretty sure it's actually because the 4th amendment makes what the government has been doing illegal. A side-effect of that is that other governments also don't get to use the loopholes our government would like, but I'm not fighting for their rights, I'm fighting for mine.

Money, Guns and Lawyers

[Caerdwyn]

Here on Slashdot there tends to exist the mindset of "blame the shooter not the gun" and the corollary "and certainly don't blame the maker of the gun". For most civil libertarians, those are axioms: that tools are value-neutral, and you criminalize their improper use, not their mere existence or the act of manufacture. Good so far. Lifetime NRA member here. Gun-totin' agnostic clinging to the Constitution.

In this case, though, we are blaming the tool AND the user AND the manufacturer. Why is it different to blame tools collectively (governmental) compared to individually? I have my own thoughts on this, and I believe it IS different. However, it takes a couple of layers of abstraction to reach that difference (specifically, that collective actions are almost always restrictive in nature while individual actions are almost always permissive in nature, and that freedom requires that permissiveness wins over restriction in all but the most severe cases).

I'd like to believe that the reactions against the existence of CALEA are reasoned rather than reactive. When you ask someone whether they favor or oppose something, if the answer you get is a frothing hind-brain reaction, that person's opinion is instantly valueless. And if that person was on the "correct" side (strictly by chance, it would seem), it becomes that much easier to dismiss ALL people with that opinion. "Yeah, you're a jingoistic , just like all the rest. I'm not even going to listen to you."

The good guys have to be the adults.

Re:Wait, what ?

[grcumb]

It's not misleading; it's the headline's purpose to get straight to the author's point, and the point is that the unintended consequence of our domestic policies has been to enable authoritarian regimes to enforce policies of their own.

To further refine your point: At the core of this lies the implication that, because of such policies, there is very little to separate us from authoritarian regimes. It's a quantum distance, to be sure, in the sense that although it's very small it would require something fundamental to change. But the distance between where we are today and a digital version of the Alien and Sedition Acts is short enough to make many people uncomfortable.

One point that irks me, though, is the contention that we're only now seeing this link. That, frankly, is bullshit.

The head of GCHQ (Britain's SigInt agency) under Tony Blair wrote an entire book on the topic last year. I myself wrote a series of three columns on the topic, all of them dealing with the diminishing gap between authoritarian policies and those of more democratic nations. Forgive me while I quote at some length...

Nokia-Siemens, defending its role in the creation of a centralised mobile telecommunications network, stated recently that:

In most countries around the world, including all EU member states and the U.S., telecommunications networks are legally required to have the capability for Lawful Intercept and this is also the case in Iran. Lawful Intercept is specified in standards defined by ETSI (European Telecommunications Standards Institute) and the 3GPP (3rd Generation Partnership Project).

Yes, decentralised communications come at a cost. They make surveillance efforts of all kinds more difficult. The two competing questions we need to ask ourselves are:

1. How far are we willing to compromise ourselves in the pursuit of state security?
2. How much are we willing to compromise state surveillance capability in order to protect our own freedom to communicate?

These are knotty issues with complex and often subtle ramifications on society. They demand a level of public engagement on the principle - and more importantly, the practice - of free speech that we haven't seen since the Red Scare of the 1950s.

Technology feels like magic to most of us. We don't - and don't want to - to know how our communications come about. We just want them to happen.

But in order for them to happen, we must inform - and arm - ourselves with the knowledge, understanding, law and policies that make it possible. Facile observations like Manjoo's do little if anything to support such an effort.

The Revolution will indeed be digitised, but only if we want it enough.

Re:This.

[element-o.p.]

Ummm... no. The biggest reason we fight wiretaps is because they are wrong.

I, sir, see your "ummm...no" and raise you another "ummm...no".

Wiretaps, used with proper judicial oversight, for legitimate law-enforcement purposes, are not wrong. If a wiretap provides the proof that a violent criminal actually committed the crime for which they are being charged, then that is a good thing. The problem exists when a government -- any government -- uses wiretaps for illegitimate purposes. For example, to spy on the population in general (for example, the NSA wiretapping), to maintain a party in power against the populace's wishes (Iran), or without receiving the proper warrants to listen in on private conversations (NSL's).

While I think O.P. might be going a bit far to say, "It's not that we don't trust our government..." because I don't trust any government with unchecked power. However, you come off sounding like either a complete wacko or a naive 12-year old when you make a blanket statement like that. There is precious little in the world that's *THAT* black and white.

Re:everything has two sides

[Locke2005]

You've got it backwards. The US is prevented by law from using it's spying technologies to spy on it's own citizens. However, it is perfectly legal to use it to spy on British citizens, while the British government uses similar technology to spy on American citizens, and then they just trade information. Voila -- perfectly legal!

Re:Wait, what ?

[c6gunner]

Oh, awesome. So I guess any day now I should see an article titled "Albert Einstein assisted North Korea in acquiring Nuclear Weapons", or "Movie Industry instrumental in helping Oppressive Regimes conduct surveillance of dissidents".

Re:This.

[element-o.p.]

Let's take your "whole picture" one step farther, then. Is surveillance (i.e., tailing you, watching you from a stake-out) okay? What happens if a cop just happens to be there when you commit a crime?

Let's go another direction. You say wiretapping is unethical. Is it unethical to kill someone? Then, what about having armed police officers? In the U.S., your average cop is armed. As another /.'er in the U.K. (IIRC) pointed out the other day, in other parts of the world, only the S.W.A.T./C.E.R.T./whatever-it-was-he-called-them units are armed. In either case, there is a branch of LEOs that is equipped and authorized to use deadly force. Do you propose to disarm the police forces? Okay, what about the military? Or are you arguing that wiretaps are evil, but deadly force is okay?

"The end justifies the means" is an argument for doing something unethical for the "Greater Good." Your argument presupposes that wiretaps are unethical. I disagree. Rather, I think it is a compromise that recognizes the fact that there are grey areas. That compromise is necessary because the alternative is anarchy. And if you think that's a viable option ("heh, heh...no one tellin' *me* what to do!"), you might want to look at what's been happening in places like Uganda for the last thirty years.