[260] in Privacy_Forum
[ PRIVACY Forum ] Senate Expands Wiretap Authority,
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (privacy@vortex.com)
Sat Aug 4 13:07:35 2007
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Date: Sat, 04 Aug 2007 09:24:17 -0700
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Senate Expands Wiretap Authority, and Mainly the Innocents Lose
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000265.html
Greetings. Little noticed amongst wall-to-wall coverage of the
Minneapolis bridge disaster is another drama of a different sort, as
the Senate voted yesterday for an expansion of warrantless
wiretapping authority demanded by the Bush administration.
(Please see the Washington Post article: http://tinyurl.com/yt5axp
for more details.)
The key demand fulfilled in the largely temporary legislation (much
of the bill essentially has a six-month expiration date) involves
wiretapping of voice and data that merely transits the United
States, rather than necessarily having endpoints here. Given the
topology of voice and especially Internet networks, this opens up a
vast range of materials to surveillance by an administration that
has already shown itself to be ethically bankrupt when it comes to
the appropriate handling of such powers.
Be that as it may, the ultimate irony in the situation is that such
moves are likely to have the unintended consequence of speeding the
pace at which such surveillance techniques become ineffective
against the real bad guys.
Increasingly, the people we'd really like to catch -- especially at
higher levels -- are assuming that their telecommunications are
being monitored, and moving increasingly to heavily encrypted
communications, steganographic obfuscation techniques, and other
mechanisms to protect their communications.
This leaves the communications of ordinary, innocent persons open to
broad snooping from governmental or other entities, especially in
the wake of the sorts of sweeping "vacuum cleaner" data collection
techniques and surveillance mistargeting that we know takes place
(e.g., mass diversion of backbone Internet traffic) despite the
administration's continuing attempts to block information about its
ultimate extent.
Most of us rarely encrypt our communications since (a) we don't
usually feel an obvious need to do so, and (b) truly automatic and
easy to use crypto mechanisms have yet to be widely deployed.
"What do I say that anyone would care to listen to?" is a common
refrain, but it's never certain which harmless statements today
might be considered "actionable" in a new context tomorrow.
If we had complete faith that our leaders would not abuse the
wiretapping powers provided to them, this would be more
of an academic discussion than anything else. Unfortunately,
both long-term and recent history show that abuses of such
surveillance systems are an endemic part of their structure.
That some actionable intelligence is still derived from wiretapping
tradecraft is undeniable. But the diminishing value of this
information given the rise in encryption use among the primarily
targeted groups, suggests that the abuse potential of this form of
surveillance increasingly outweighs its legitimate usefulness. This
makes the necessity of tight judicial and congressional oversight
even more important -- not less.
Congress should resist administration efforts to diminish or
marginalize such oversight -- in fact the oversight needs to be
greatly strengthened. Even putting aside serious misgivings about
the current administration, we should rightly be concerned about how
future administrations could abuse wiretapping tools and
authorities granted to them.
Fighting crime and terrorism is a worthy goal, but so is preserving
the hard-fought rights that we're ultimately trying to protect.
To do the former without the latter is to undermine the very
foundations of what makes this country great.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein
lauren@vortex.com or lauren@pfir.org
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800
http://www.pfir.org/lauren
Co-Founder, PFIR
- People For Internet Responsibility - http://www.pfir.org
Founder, PRIVACY Forum - http://www.vortex.com
Member, ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
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