Warrantless Wiretaps
Uncle Sam on the Line – Former Attorney General John Ashcroft wrote the preceding New York Times editorial in reference to the seemingly unconstitutional warrantless wiretapping that was first authorized by the Bush administration under his watch and the subsequent attempt to grant the teleco companies retroactive immunity for their suspected crimes. The resulting letters to the editor begin to explain why his logic and motive are suspect.
Senator Russ Feingold points out the most important, if obvious, fact:
Telecom companies that cooperate with a government wiretap request are already immune from lawsuits, as long as they get a court order or a certification from the attorney general that the wiretap follows all applicable statutes.
Bush’s wiretapping plan circumvents an established practice that had worked since being enacted in 1978. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) allows for retroactive warrants in the case of emergency, so the telecoms could have complied with emergency requests but still required warrants for on-going spying. If the president didn’t believe the FISA court would agree to the wiretaps his administration requested, it raises troubling questions about who he intended to target and why.
I regularly make and receive international phone calls so this issue is personal to me. But even assuming I’m not being bugged, wiretapping as a defensive measure is also a bad idea in practice. For those that require privacy it is very easy to run a telecommunications server in a location unavailable to the federal government’s spying. It would still be possible to intercept the raw voice streams, but it is the end-to-end connection data that is most important for raising the flags that lead to wiretapping. Anyone can walk into an internet cafe and make calls through private telecommunications servers and the FBI/CIA will be unable to determine who is calling whom, making it impossible to determine the nationality and location of callers as Bush’s new wiretapping rules require. The software and hardware required is cheap or free (I worked writing and implementing such software for a time). For that matter, terrorist plans could easily be rerouted through the US Post Office or as asynchronous recordings on obscure secure websites.
Are we really expecting terrorists to call on AT&T before they come? No, and that is why warrantless wiretapping is wrong. It is an ineffective spying technique against intelligent terrorism, but quite effective at diminishing our perceived right to privacy.
politics posted by: dan @ 07 Nov 2007 10:09