November 22, 2005
A NEW method of communicating is creating intriguing services that beat old ways of sending information, but law enforcement makes a sombre claim that these new networks will become a boon to criminals and terrorists unless governments can listen in.
This was the storyline in the mid-1990s when the Clinton administration sought to have electronic communications encrypted only by a National Security Agency-developed Clipper Chip, for which the FBI would have a key.The Clipper Chip eventually went the way of clipper ships after the industry baulked and researchers showed that its cryptographic approach was flawed anyway.
While the Clipper Chip died, the dilemma it illuminated remains.
With each new advance in communications, the government wants the same level of snooping power that authorities have exercised over phone conversations for a century.
Technologists recoil, accusing the government of micromanaging, and potentially limiting, innovation.
Today, this tug-of-war is playing out over US Federal Communications Commission demands that a phone wiretapping law be extended to voice-over-internet services and broadband networks.
Opponents are trying to block the ruling on various grounds: that it goes beyond the original scope of the law; that it will force network owners to make complex changes at their own expense, and that it will have questionable value in improving security.
No matter who wins the battle over this law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, this probably won't be the last time authorities raise hackles by seeking a bird's eye view of the information flow created by new technology.
Authorities are justified in trying to reduce the ways that technology helps dangerous people operate in the shadows, says Daniel Solove, author of The Digital Person.
A parallel concern is that technology can end up increasing government surveillance power rather than just maintaining it.
"We have to ask ourselves anew the larger question: what surveillance power should the government have?" says Solove, an assistant professor at George Washington University Law School. "And to what extent should the government be allowed to manage the development of technology to embody its surveillance capability?"
Congress passed the Act in 1994, requiring telecoms carriers to ensure that their networks left it relatively easy for law enforcement to set wiretaps. The law applied to landline and mobile phone networks but essentially exempted the internet.
Of course, at the time, federal officials were advocating use of the Clipper Chip to ensure that bad guys couldn't hide by encrypting their online traffic. The FBI also was developing Carnivore, a program that agents could tailor to grab specific emails and other internet communications defined in a court order. The FBI eventually dropped Carnivore in favour of commercial software and frequent cooperation from internet service providers often made technology unnecessary anyway.
All the while the agency was harvesting the fruits of a system called Echelon, intercepting millions of international telephone calls and feeding them into its giant maw for analysis.
Justifiably or not, each of these steps unsettled privacy activists, and it is that unease that colours the current fight over expanding the Act's reach to new services such as voice over internet protocol by 2007.
The Federal Communications Commission says the move is critical because converting voice calls into data packets essentially replaces the old phone system.
"The Act in a sense is the culmination of where we've been," says Barry Steinhardt, director of the technology and liberty program at the American Civil Liberties Union.
"Now the communications network is built to be wiretap-ready, so you don't need Carnivore anymore. It's just intrinsic to the system."
The Act's critics also say authorities haven't shown that existing monitoring methods are so weak as to justify costly new back doors for government snooping.
AP