White House Effort to Allow Internet Tapping Could Create Vulnerabilities
Some civil liberties groups see problems with Obama administration plans to submit a bill next year to make the Internet subject to wiretap orders, as reported by The New York Times. The bill would affect peer-to-peer communications like Facebook and VoIP services including Skype. Federal officials said the bill is needed because “their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is going dark as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone,” according to the Times.
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Extending rules for phone networks to the Internet “is an obvious concern,” said Elise Dieterich of the Sullivan & Worcester law firm. “There can be significant costs to apply to CALEA the way the phone companies do.” The proposal is an “anti-privacy, anti-security and anti-innovation solution in search of a problem,” said Kevin Bankston, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It’s like “the government mandating that every home and office should have a peephole and eavesdropping microphone pre-installed in case the government ever needed it,” he said.
Interception capability requirements in CALEA apply to telephone and broadband networks, but services that encrypt messages force the government to serve ISPs, instead of the originating communications networks, with orders. Officials are considering laws to require developers of peer-to-peer communication software to “redesign their service to allow interception” and foreign-based providers operating in the U.S. to “install a domestic office capable of performing intercepts,” the Times said.
The requirements would create challenges for Skype and other VoIP providers, whose services weren’t designed with communications regulation in mind, critics said. Interception capabilities “haven’t been built into their technology at the outset,” Dieterich said. Innovation would be stifled in the technology business, which is doing well, Bankston said: “Would Skype have been built if it had to include an artificial bottleneck for all P2P communications so the government can wiretap them?"
Increasing government access creates vulnerabilities, Bankston said. When back doors are created for the government, “not only do we invite abuse by overzealous investigators, but by hackers and foreign governments,” he said. If it’s easier to get past encryption, communications “may be more accessible to others and made less private than they currently are,” Dieterich said.
Cost and oversight must be considered as the administration crafts the bill, said James Lewis, technology policy director of the Center for Strategic & International Studies. Service providers “are being asked to do something that costs them money,” he said. “The government will have to think about how they'll compensate the companies for the additional costs.”
The prospect increases privacy concerns, said Daniel Castro, senior analyst at the Information Technology Innovation Foundation. “People have questions now about how companies collect their data and what’s being done with it.” The same standards will have to apply to the government, he said. Castro says the measure wouldn’t be effective long term. “There’s going to be communication that slips through the cracks, and it will probably be the communication that federal investigators care the most about."
Capitol Hill kept quiet on the proposed law Monday, but staffers paid attention to it. Senate Commerce Republicans are carefully reviewing the matter, a Senate GOP staffer said. The Obama administration hasn’t provided specific proposals to the Senate Judiciary Committee about updating CALEA, a Senate staffer said. The House and Senate Commerce and Judiciary committees didn’t comment.
There are other avenues for information, Castro said. “The government can use different data points,” like credit card transactions and electronic RFID scans. It should let the industry “innovate more in that area” instead of “impose a 20th century model on us.”