Wiretap News Updated
12/17/2010
EPIC Urges Court Review of Surveillance
Program.
EPIC, in cooperation with the Stanford Constitutional Law Center,
filed a "friend-of-the-court" brief (pdf) in "Hepting v. AT&T." This
lawsuit alleges that AT&T allowed the government to wiretap calls and
e-mails without judicial authority. The U.S. government and AT&T seek to
dismiss this case. The EPIC brief states, "The statutes and
constitutional provisions relied upon in the complaint are designed to
interpose the courts between citizens and the government when government
conducts surveillance that it naturally would prefer to conduct in
secret and wholly at its own discretion . . . . This litigation should
thus proceed, lest the privacy claims here be made effectively unreviewable." For more information, see EPIC's Resources on Domestic
Surveillance and Spotlight on Surveillance on the NSA Program. (http://epic.org/privacy/hepting/)
Congress will Consider Amnesty to Telecom
Providers
Congress returned Tuesday from a two-week spring break to find the
Bush administration now willing to talk compromise on new wiretapping
powers, and on amnesty for telecoms that spied on U.S. citizens. That
means an end to the drama that's characterized the debate thus far -- a
closed congressional session; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style
floor speeches, and unrelenting, factually-challenged charges that
lawmakers are blindfolding the nation's spies. Now negotiations over the
bill will likely happen over weeks and months, behind closed doors, with
the House horse-trading oversight provisions with the Senate in exchange
for a compromise on total amnesty for the nation's telecoms.
(Wired Magazine -
http://www.wired.com/politics/onlinerights/news/2008/04/fisa_faq?currentPage=all)
FBI's $500 Million Wiretap Retrofitting Fund
Empty The FBI has gone through nearly all of its $500 millon budget for making
old telephone switches wiretap friendly, but an FBI survey showed that
nearly 40 percent of the nation's switches still aren't up to federal
wiretapping standards, according to a new report from the Justice
Department's inspector general. When listening in to criminals, the FBI uses DCS-3000 to connect to
wiretap-friendly telephone switches. A 1994 law known as the
Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act or CALEA requires all
telephone switches installed after 1995 to comply with detailed
wiretapping rules, and Congress set aside a half billion dollars for the
FBI to dole out to help carriers make older landline switches compliant. Cell phone switches, however, are all compliant and nearly all FBI
surveillance targets cell phones and pagers. In 2005, the feds got some
1800 criminal wiretap court orders, along with nearly 2,200 court orders
for anti-terrorism and foreign intelligence wiretaps. According to a redacted report from the DOJ's Inspector General, the FBI
has only a little more than $5000 left in dedicated CALEA funds, which
mostly went towards paying switch manufacturers to write wiretapping
software and issue licenses to use that software for older switches. The
audit says it is not possible to tell if the money was well-spent, since
neither the telecoms nor the switch makers are keen on sharing
information.
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