Views and Links on Internet Surveillance, Privacy, and Carnivore

I asked class members to e-mail me a "tidbit" (a paragraph or two with web links) relating to the balance between privacy and security in electronic surveillance (e.g., wiretapping). I said: "Your tidbit can relate to uses or abuses of electronic surveillance in the past and/or in other countries, congressional hearings or legislation, organizations, or published positions of public figures. Poke around a bit on the Web and find something interesting.  There are many places to look, since this issue has been debated in the US in response to other events over the last 50 years or so."   Here's what we came up with:

Leigh Spoon

I found an article that discusses the history of wiretapping and the legal issues surrounding it. It also discusses what this means for the the Internet and CALEA. The Article is called TAPPING THE NET: A STUDY OF THE WIRETAP DEBATES and it was written by Karen Cheung. The article can be found at: 

Also, I just read this in today's paper, you probably have already seen it though. Here's the last paragraph-

In the end, we will never know whether these measures would have prevented the terrorist attacks of last week. But we can be confident that these tools, coupled with support from our high-technology community, can help prevent future attacks. In the mid-1980s, when Congress last updated the wiretap laws, senior officials from a few companies, most notably AT&T and IBM, helped shape the right balance between security and freedom because they understood the network, the needs of their customers, the needs of law enforcement and the Constitution.

Today, the networked world is more complex and business is more diffuse. But just as every person, organization and business is pulling together to help rebuild New York City, so too must the high-tech community come together with the Bush administration and Congress to help find solutions, both legal and technological, that preserve our constitutional liberties while strengthening our nation's security.

C.J. Wilson

Here is an article I found on Carnivore. It is rather critical of the FBI program but is very interesting because it shows how the program works and the flaws that it has.

Jane Bloomgarden

Information taken from Can We Tape:

Federal law says phone calls and other electronic communications can be recorded with the consent of at least one party. Most states and territories have adopted wiretapping statutes based on the federal law, but also including in-person conversations. Thirty-eight states and Washington D.C. permit individuals to record conversations they are involved in without informing the other parties that they are doing so. Twelve states require the consent of all parties to a conversation. It is illegal in all states to record a conversation you are not involved in, do not have consent to tape, and could not naturally overhear. Federal law and most state laws also make it illegal to disclose the contents of an illegally intercepted call or communication. At least fifteen states have laws outlawing the use of hidden cameras in private places but the audio portion of a videotape is treated under the regular wiretapping laws in any state. Also, many of the statutes concern unattended hidden cameras, not cameras hidden on a person engaged in a conversation.

Animesh Jain

I found this page from the computerworld.com website. The article is a copy of a statement made by the ACLU's Barry Steinhardt to Congress. Specifically, the statement focuses on the FBI's use of Carnivore (which we discusses in class on tuesday). Many interesting points are brought up by Steinhardt. He discusses the ways that Carnivore is a significant leap from traditional wiretapping because it can record CONTENT of the ENTIRE network. Also, the public knows very little about what Carnivore is actually capable of -- the source code is not public. Steinhardt also voices concerns that the FBI may very well be recording information that is not relevant to FBI investigations. Furthermore, there has been a sharp decline in the percentage of intercepted communications that are actually criminally relevant. One of the most interesting tidbits that I read in the transcript was that "the Clinton administration conducted more wiretaps in one year than ever in history."

Franklin Winokur

FCC Okays FBI Cell Phone "Location Tracking" Request. In a statement released on October 22,1999, the Federal Communications Commission expressed its initial approval of FBI-proposed technical requirements that would enable law enforcement to determine the location of individuals using cellular telephones. A formal notice was released on November 5. The Commission rejected other capabilities requested by the Bureau and deferred decisions on other issues, including surveillance of Internet communications. The initial decision came in a proceeding under the controversial Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA)

statement released on October 22,1999
formal notice released on November 5, 1999

Mary Peavey

The evil incident to invasion of the privacy of the telephone is far greater than that involved in tampering with the mails. Whenever a telephone line is tapped, the privacy of the persons at both ends of the line is invaded, and all conversations between them upon any subject, and although proper, confidential, and privileged, may be overheard. Moreover, the tapping of one man's telephone line involves the tapping of the telephone of every other person whom he may call, or who may call him. As a means of espionage, writs of assistance and general warrants are but puny instruments of tyranny and oppression when compared with wire tapping.

Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438 (1928)

Logan Miller

Here's the Ashcroft stuff that I was talking about in class on Tuesday. I tried to find the exact speech with his actual words, but I had no luck.

Here's another that peaked my interest...

Elise Dagenbach

This is a dialogue about wiretaps, security, privacy, and civil liberties. This is just one of the dialogues between these two men, all are related to the issue at hand.
Did Encryption Empower These Terrorists?
Spy Satellite System Looks for Clues -- Effectiveness/ineffectiveness of satellites against terrorists.

In my search for information related to the issue at hand, I found a series of posted dialogues on slate.msn.com/dialogues between Stewart Baker and Eugene Volokh. The site says Baker is the "head of the technology practice at Steptoe & Johnson, a former general counsel of the National Security Agency, and co-author of a book titled The Limits of Trust: Cryptography, Governments, and Electronic Commerce. Eugene Volokh teaches constitutional law at UCLA School of Law and is the author of a textbook on the First Amendment and many law review articles on rights questions." In this dialogue series, the two men debate privacy vs. security in light of last Tuesday in terms of technology, specifically wiretapping, and civil liberties. I tend to agree with Baker, who believes it is better to trust the authorities using tapping devices in general and set up checks and audits to safeguard privacy.

The second link I found discusses encryption and if it aided these terrorists. It discusses the effects of making encryption easily accessible to the public at large, the power encryption tools hold, how they are good for security, and how they endanger us. I especially liked the video/ demo that gave a brief tutorial on how encryption works. The final link is about how American satellites are being used to find the terrorists and how effective (or ineffective) satellites are in finding out information prior to an attack. I believe the current focus and methods our government agencies hold need to be adjusted to better prevent and combat such attacks. I believe technology needs to be utilized extensively in these areas, supplemented by undercover reconaissance, but I don't think the nation is using its technological capabilities as effectively as possible. Obviously, our nation is vulnerable. We need to find ways of using our technologies and intelligence to strengthen our weak spots and make the US more resilient to such attacks.

Mary Rogers

I believe that a careful balance must be created between an individual's right to have privacy and the government's ability to intercept communications in order to protect the nation. In the link below, Stewart Baker, the head of the technology practice at Steptoe & Johnson and a former general counsel of the National Security Agency, discusses the unsteady balance between personal liberty and national security. I agree with him on his views on "Carnivore" and the limits that should be placed on such technology. I believe that the ability to monitor internet communications is important for national security but I also believe that such technology should be used very carefully and under the strict supervision of the US judicial system. Law enforcement should not have free usage of programs like "Carnivore" just like they are limited on their ability to tap phones. Also, new procedures need to be established to double-check officials who have the authorization to use such technology to insure that they do not abuse their power.

dialogue 1 or dialogue2.

This link contains the US State Department's reports on worldwide privacy abuses, which includes mail seizures, wiretapping and more.

This link contains an article against wiretapping and ways to limit wiretapping. This link is a site dedicated to wiretapping issues.

Amy Starratt

Here is a small excerpt from this Cato Institute article:

The FBI now demands powers far beyond those CALEA gave it. Far from maintaining the status quo, the FBI is using CALEA as a wedge to make Americans subject to a degree of electronic surveillance that would have astonished the KGB.

The technology the FBI demands would let them evade the requirement that police get a warrant to listen to the content of a call. Before CALEA, the police could use a device called a "pen register" to track the phone numbers of outgoing and incoming calls to a particular telephone. In 1979 five members of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Smith v. Maryland that the federal Constitution does not require the police to get a warrant for a pen register. (In dissent, Justice Potter Stewart noted that pen registers "reveal the identities of the persons and the places called, and thus reveal the most intimate details of a person's life." Justice Thurgood Marshall agreed, saying, "Many individuals, including members of unpopular political organizations or journalists with confidential sources, may legitimately wish to avoid disclosure of their personal contacts.") Given the absence of court supervision, unsurprisingly, pen register use far exceeds wiretap use.

Ralph Gorham

This is a website about the different types of wiretaps and bugs.

Nikolai Gasiorowski

This is from a blurb revealing the efficiency or capabilities of a wire tap rather than just an example of a case:

A roving wiretap would enable police to monitor all phone calls made by a suspect, rather than just those from a specific telephone. High speed computers would monitor calls passing through a certain network, selecting and "red flagging" a conversation that contained the peculiar "voice print" - a digitized pattern of a person's unique vocal characteristics - of a person under investigation. If the suspect made a phone call from his neighbor's house, or used a cell phone or pay phone, his call would be recognized, retrieved and uploaded to a law enforcement agent by the carrier's "critical electronic equipment". These same computers would be able to recognize certain words and phrases and record those conversations for law enforcement scrutiny as well. This technology is already employed by the National Security Agency to monitor international calls, and some experts believe it is already in use in some parts of the U.S. (Source: The Implications of Roving Wiretap Technology by Allan Colombo, Safety and Security Magazine). The FBI has also requested the capability to track the location of every cell phone in the U.S. that is in the "standby" mode. This would make a tracking device out of every cell phone used in the country.

Lauren Galluccio