FW: Stu Baker: Fox News goes overboard on Internet wiretap story

[Caspar Bowden]

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-politech@politechbot.com
[mailto:owner-politech@politechbot.com] On Behalf Of Declan McCullagh
Sent: 29 October 2001 16:54
To: politech@politechbot.com
Subject: FC: Stu Baker: Fox News goes overboard on Internet wiretap
story


The Fox News article in question (which did not appear on Politech):

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,37203,00.html
>    WASHINGTON -- The Federal Bureau of Investigation is seeking to
>    broaden considerably its ability to tap into Internet traffic in
its
>    quest to root out terrorists, going beyond even the new measures
>    afforded in anti-terror legislation signed by President Bush
Friday,
>    according to lawyers familiar with the FBIs plans.
>
>    Stewart Baker, an attorney at the Washington D.C.-based Steptoe &
>    Johnson and a former general consul to National Security Agency,
said
>    the FBI has plans to change the architecture of the Internet and
route
>    traffic through central servers that it would be able to monitor
>    e-mail more easily.
[...]

********

From: "Baker, Stewart" <SBaker@steptoe.com>
To: "'declan@well.com'" <declan@well.com>
cc: "Albertazzie, Sally" <SAlbertazzie@steptoe.com>
Subject: Fox News goes overboard
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 09:48:17 -0500

Declan:

Fox News recently reported that the FBI has a plan to change the
architecture of the Internet, centralizing it and providing "a technical
backdoor to the networks of Internet service providers."  Like many
others, I thought this was big news, and rather surprising.  Until I
realized that the reporter only cited one source and that it was, well,
me.  Fox News's claims go beyond the facts I provided to her, and beyond
any that I know about.

To be clear, I believe that the FBI is at work on an initiative to make
Internet communications, indeed any packet data communications, more
susceptible to intercept and more productive of non-content data about
communications -- the sort of "pen register" data that was expressly
approved for Internet communications in the recent antiterrorism bill.
This initiative will have architectural implications for packet data
communications systems.  The FBI is likely to press providers of those
services to centralize communications in nodes where interception will
be more convenient, and it is likely to call on packet data services to
build systems that provide more information about the communications of
their subscribers.

The vehicle for this initiative is CALEA, the Communications Assistance
for Law Enforcement Act, a 1994 enactment that actually requires telecom
carriers to redesign their networks to provide better wiretap
capabilities. The act is supposed to exempt information services, but
the vagueness of that provision has encouraged the FBI to expand its
mandate into packet-data communications.  The Bureau is now preparing a
general CALEA proposal for all packet-data systems.  While I have not
seen it, the Bureau's past interventions into packet-data and other
communications architecture have had two characteristics -- they have
sought more centralization in order to simplify interception and they
have asked providers to generate new data messages about their
subscribers' activities -- messages that are of value only to law
enforcement.

There are real legal and policy questions that should be raised about
this effort.  In my view, it goes beyond what Congress intended in 1994.
And the implications for Internet users and technologies deserve to be
debated.  But making these points, as I did with Fox News, is not the
same as saying that the FBI has a firm plan to centralize the Internet
and build back doors into all ISP networks.  If Fox News wants to break
that story, it will need a source other than me.

Stewart Baker
Steptoe & Johnson LLP
1330 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036




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