Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 1824
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One of the issues with the "new telecom"
[Read the article: Democrats' responsibility for Bush radicalism]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches.
The growth of that transit traffic had become a major issue for the intelligence community, officials say, because it had not been fully addressed by 1970's-era laws and regulations governing the N.S.A. Now that foreign calls were being routed through switches on American soil, some judges and law enforcement officials regarded eavesdropping on those calls as a possible violation of those decades-old restrictions, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for domestic surveillance.
The switch to IP has been slow (and slower than some of the prognosticators and proponents of IP had forecast back in the '90s), but it is happening. Certainly IP is the exclusive domain of e-mail and web sites, but the change here has been in the human behaviour, as people get more used to these forms of communication (IM, etc., that substitute for the old phone call). For various reasons, IP telephony has been slow to catch on as well (I won't bore you with the technical details). But it is finally starting to happen ... and this is in part what motivated the updates to the CALEA laws to encompass IP, the latest being the May 14th, 2007 mandates.
Why does it matter? Well, because to snoops, the IP world is technically very difficult to manage snoops in. For circuit-switched voice (the old telecom), the paths for traffic were, while technologically very robust, quite finite: You had usually just tandems (two of everything), but between those two paths, pretty much all traffic flowed, and that's where you'd hook your "tap" in. You'd talk to the carrier providing the service to a "target" and they'd put in the taps so that you got everything they said and heard. Same for dial-up IP even; as long as people called up from home, you'd get it all. With the advent of mobile phones, the problems got a bit worse in terms of instituting taps, but it was manageable; a telco could still provision all the hundred or so MSCs --that they own and maintain, in their nationwide network -- and whichever one was carrying "target" traffic could duly forward the information to the snoops.
But in the IP world, the routing is dynamic, and very much multi-path (and intentionally so; rather than two rock-solid tandems, IP relies on massive redundancy and dynamically reroutable pathing of less than six sigma equipment, but it's also statistically prone to service losses, but people are "use to" that, and deal with dropped calls or needing to click "reload").
Small ISPs were addressed in the latest CALEA updates, because they're really the only ones that "know" who the
Because of this distributed nature, to effectively tap it, you need to grab everything and everywhere if you really want to get all communications of a "target". Finding the best places to tap is the crux of effective surveillance. This is one of the reasons for trying to get foreign stuff into the U.S. to tap (the NSA can't rely on passive snoops of satellite traffic as they did with Menwith Hill, nor can they waltz into a foreign telco and demand access).
Trying to centralize the routing (preferably here) is one such step.
But snooping here, without filters, is bound to intercept lots of stuff that's domestic.
The big issue is who's doing the provisioning ... and the filtering, and what kind of material is handed over.
Cheers,
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@ Ondolette
[Read the article: Democrats' responsibility for Bush radicalism]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It never had anything to do with getting the right to monitor foreign to foreign calls routed through the U.S. -- Feinstein and Rockefeller offered that specifically to them months ago and they rejected it (S.1114). As you point out, that already could be done anyway. What couldn't be done was put the monitoring equipment here.
I don't read it that way. They could put the monitoring stuff here under 50 § 1801(f)(2), but, as I said the rub is that they would have to have equipment that was sufficiently discriminating that it intercepted only foreign-to-foreign communications. If such equipment, even inadvertently, intercepted communications to or from a person in the U.S., that would be a violation (along with even potentially criminal prosecution). This may have been a motivating force behind the "reasonably believes" provisions; an effort to allow good faith measures without incurring the wrath of the DoJ (oh, right, ha-ha!) for any lapses. The alternative would be to get equipment that was bullet-proof WRT only grabbing purely foreign communications.
50 USC § 1801(f)(2) provides more protection than does § 1801(f)(1) in that it covers all "persons", not just "United States persons" and that it covers "associates" as well as "targets".
As I said, the cure is to do what the CALEA laws do, and focus on the "target" instead (by just removing the "geographic" provision of § 1801(f)(2)). This would bring it in line with the CALEA laws, that don't require warrants for each and every person on a call, only for the "target". Your calls can be tapped w/o a warrant under CALEA/Title III, as lng as you are calling a "target"....
I suspect the reason for eliminating (rather than focusing on) the "target" concept, is that they want be be free from the requirement of identifying the subject of the surveillance specifically, and also want to be able to "follow the crumbs" without needing court orders along the way. Six degrees of Kevin Bacon, here we come.
Cheers,