US Seeks To Pressure Google, Facebook Into Installing Wiretapping Backdoors.
US Seeks To Pressure Google, Facebook Into Installing Wiretapping Backdoors.
In the US, the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) has what
it calls a Going Dark problem.
As the FBI has been telling it for the past few years, the
agency is unable to tap the latest generation of Internet communications venues
- at least, not always easily or quickly - as it seeks to eavesdrop on
terrorists, child pornographers, human traffickers, arms traffickers, drug
dealers or other criminals.
A government task force is now preparing
legislation that would fix all that by putting the screws on companies such as
Facebook and Google, forcing them to enable law enforcement to intercept
communications in real time, according to The Washington Post.
The proposal is designed to expand the
reach of CALEA, the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act.
CALEA is a wiretapping law passed under President Bill Clinton
that requires telecom service providers and equipment providers to design or
modify their products, facilities and services to have surveillance
capabilities built in from the ground up so that Feds can monitor all
telephone, broadband Internet, and VoIP traffic in real time.
The panel's proposal will broaden the reach of the law by
specifying that it also covers peer-to-peer communication—e.g., Internet phone
calls.
Relying on "current and former U.S. officials familiar with
the effort," the Post reports that the task force will propose penalties
for companies that fail to comply with court authorizations for wiretapping.
As it is now, FBI lawyer Valerie Caproni told a government committee back in 2011,
G-Men are getting stymied by surveillance targets' reliance on an ever more
tangled web of communications providers.
Some of those providers are based overseas, far from the long
arm of the Feds or otherwise outside the scope of laws such as CALEA that force
providers to roll over when the government tells them to.
Then again, some of the communications players who could help
the FBI to eavesdrop just don't have the existing technical means to let them
listen in, or even the know-how to set it up, according to the FBI.
It all adds up to big time delays for the government when it
comes to getting the information it needs to catch bad guys, Caproni said:
"[Some] providers may not have intercept
capabilities in place at the time that they receive the order. Even if they
begin actively attempting to engineer a solution immediately upon receipt of
the order and work diligently with government engineers, months and sometimes
years can pass before they are able to develop a solution that complies with
the applicable court order. Some providers never manage to comply with the
orders fully.
"Even providers that are covered by CALEA
do not always maintain the required capabilities and can be slow at providing
assistance. Indeed, as with non-CALEA providers, for some CALEA-covered
entities, months can elapse between the time the government obtains a court
order and surveillance begins. In the interim period, potentially critical
information is lost even though a court has explicitly authorized the
surveillance.
Rather than just strong-arming the providers whose cooperation
they need to listen in on communications, the Feds typically just back off if a
company resists, according to The Washington Post's sources.
Hence the concept of "going dark", as the FBI portrays
itself, increasingly groping blindly in information lock-out.
The panel's draft proposal reportedly would allow a court to
levy a series of escalating fines, starting at tens of thousands of dollars, to
those companies that fail to comply with wiretap orders.
Those companies that don't open up their doors to wiretapping
within a certain period of time would automatically face judicial inquiry,
which could lead to fines.
To light a hotter fire still under recalcitrant companies, the
fines would double if left unpaid after 90 days.
The proposal would let companies figure out how to satisfy
surveillance demands themselves. Smaller companies would be exempt from fines.
Some services, as The Washington Post points out, have never
fallen under CALEA compliance, including social media networks like Facebook or
chat features of online gaming sites.
Former officials told the newspaper that
Google seriously mucked everything up for wiretapping when it initiated end-to-end encryption of Gmail back in 2010, after it and at least 20
other companies got hacked.
Other sites, including Twitter and Facebook, quickly jumped on
the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption bandwagon, further gumming up the
wiretapping works.
A former senior Justice Department official, Kenneth L.
Wainstein, assistant attorney general for national security from 2006 to 2008,
told The Washington Post that the proposal isn't about seeking expanded
surveillance.
Rather, he said it's about making sure that officials' existing
authorities "can be applied across the full range of communications technologies."
But is the US government really in the dark? Are its
surveillance powers diminished greatly?
Privacy watchdogs say No, quite the contrary.
In fact, some privacy experts have dubbed
this the golden
age of surveillance.
The Center for Democracy and Technology in the fall published an
excerpt from a paper by Peter Swire, the C. William O'Neill Professor of Law at
the Moritz College of Law of the Ohio State University, and Kenesa Ahmad, Legal
and Policy Associate with the Future of Privacy Forum.
In the excerpt, the O'Neill and Ahmad noted that while the
internet and evolving IP-based communications do present obstacles to lawful
interception of communications, law enforcement has "far greater
capabilities than ever before" with regards to location information,
information about suspects' contacts and confederates, and "an array of
new databases" that can be mined to help identify suspects and create
"digital dossiers" on individuals.
Furthermore, some say that wiring in eavesdropping backdoors
will leave servers vulnerable to getting hacked.
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