Subject: RE: [NEXTEL-1] Shhh! The FBI's listening to your keystrokes

From: "Madden, Roger" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 19 Apr 2004 14:41:16 -0400

This is an interesting bit, Marcel.  

Aside from the DHS intonations of personal surveillance a la Philip
Roth's book "1984", it appears that Congress may have exempted Nextel.
As I understand it, they aren't a common carrier.  They are a commercial
service provider on private radio (frequencies by FCC definition, but
not by statute.  SMRs and ESMRs aren't common carriers, are they?

Roger Madden
__________

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] 
Sent: Monday, April 19, 2004 1:33 PM
To: WFHSG; [email-masked]
Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Shhh! The FBI's listening to your keystrokes

Shhh! The FBI's listening to your keystrokes
April 19, 2004, 4:00 AM PT
By Declan McCullagh

The FBI is trying to convince the government to mandate that providers
of 
broadband, Internet telephony, and instant-messaging services build in 
backdoors for easy wiretapping.

That would constitute a sweeping expansion of police surveillance
powers. 
Instead of asking Congress to approve the request, the FBI (along with
the 
Department of Justice and the Drug Enforcement Administration) are
pressing 
the Federal Communications Commission to move forward with minimal
public 
input.

The three agencies argue that the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law

Enforcement Act (CALEA) permits the FCC to rewire the Internet to suit
the 
eavesdropping establishment.
The bureau's not talking, but it seems to be all about ease of
eavesdropping. 	
"The importance and the urgency of this task cannot be overstated,"
their 
proposal says. "The ability of federal, state and local law enforcement
to 
carry out critical electronic surveillance is being compromised today."

Unfortunately for the three agencies, CALEA, as it's written, would not 
grant the request.

When Congress was debating CALEA, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh
reassured 
nervous senators that the law would be limited to telephone calls.
(CALEA 
was intended to let police wiretap conversations flowing through
then-novel 
services like cellular phones and three-way calling.)

"So what we are looking for is strictly telephone--what is said over a 
telephone?" Sen. Larry Pressler, R-S.D., asked.

Freeh replied: "That is the way I understand it. Yes, sir."

A House of Representatives commitee report prepared in October 1994 is 
emphatic, saying CALEA's requirements "do not apply to information
services 
such as electronic-mail services; or online services such as CompuServe,

Prodigy, America Online or Mead Data (Central); or to Internet service 
providers."

Freeh, who has a sincere appreciation for wiretaps, had included
Internet 
services in an earlier version of CALEA--but Congress didn't buy it. 
"Unlike the bills previously proposed by the FBI, this bill is limited
to 
local and long-distance telephone companies, cellular and PCS providers,

and other common carriers," Jerry Berman of the Electronic Frontier 
Foundation told Congress during a September 1994 hearing.

But now that more conversations are taking place through audio-based 
instant-messaging and voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) services, the
FBI 
and its allies are hoping that official Washington won't remember 
inconvenient details.
Louis Freeh reassured nervous senators that CALEA would be limited to 
telephone calls. 	
"These (wiretapping) problems are real, not hypothetical, and their
impact 
on the ability of federal, state and local law enforcement to protect
the 
public is growing with each passing day," the police agencies say in
their 
proposal to the FCC.

It's true that the FBI has a difficult job to do, especially after Sept.

11, 2001, but is this proposal necessary, let alone wise?

Police have long been able to intercept Internet traffic. In 1996, 
then-Attorney General Janet Reno announced that investigators were 
successfully tapping the Internet without any problems. Even earlier,
the 
Secret Service's "datataps" of Masters of Deception members helped bust 
that hacking group in 1992. Efficient Internet wiretapping is exactly
what 
the FBI's Carnivore system, also called DCS1000, is designed to
accomplish.

Then why is the FBI so emphatic? The bureau's not talking, but it seems
to 
be all about ease of eavesdropping. Sorting through an intercepted
stream 
of data is difficult and means that Carnivore must be updated to unpack
the 
Session Initiation Protocol used to set up VoIP and instant-messaging 
conversations. Ordering those companies to include a backdoor for police
is 
a lot easier.

It's worth noting that the FBI is hardly alone. The National Sheriffs' 
Association, the Police Executive Research Forum, the Illinois State
Police 
and the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation have petitioned the FCC to
grant 
the FBI's request.

They're even sharing talking points: Each of the groups included an 
identical paragraph in its letter to the FCC. "State and local law 
enforcement do not have the financial or personnel resources to develop 
costly ad hoc surveillance solutions for each new communications
service," 
their letters said.

Maybe they're right. New technologies do present police with new
headaches, 
and perhaps that justifies additional wiretapping powers. But the
question 
will be: Who gets to make that call--elected representatives in Congress
or 
well-meaning but unelected bureaucrats at the FCC?

biography
Declan McCullagh is CNET News.com's Washington, D.C., correspondent. He 
chronicles the busy intersection between technology and politics. Before

that, he worked for several years as Washington bureau chief for Wired 
News. He has also worked as a reporter for The Netly News, Time magazine

and HotWired.

http://news.com.com/2010-1028-5193750.html

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 20 Apr 2004 22:13:56 -0400

The real interesting thing is that Nextel must apply for Designation as an
Eligible Telecommunications Carrier for each state to receive federal
universal service support for service offered in designated rural and non
rural areas of its licensed service area.