(NEW YORK) MintPress — In a development that might have alarmed even George Orwell, the FBI general counsel’s office has drafted a proposed law requiring all services that provide communications, including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking websites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer” messaging such as Skype, to alter their code to ensure products are wiretap-friendly.
And the agency is asking internet companies not to oppose the legislation.
The proposal would amend the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which required phone networks to have interception capabilities so that government surveillance abilities would still work as copper-wire phone systems evolved into cellphones and digital networks.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) extended CALEA in 2004 to apply to broadband networks.
Indeed, federal law enforcement and national security officials have been arguing for some time that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorist suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.
The FBI developed what is now known as its “Going Dark Program” in 2006, spending millions to bolster its electronic surveillance capabilities, including hiring consultants at Rand Corporation and Booz Allen to come up with ways to make it easier to wiretap the internet.
In 2010, as officials prepared a bill to send to Congress, the then-general counsel for the FBI, Valerie E. Caproni, said, “We’re talking about lawfully authorized intercepts. We’re not talking expanding authority. We’re talking about preserving our ability to executing our existing authority in order to protect the public safety and national security.”
Threats to civil liberties on the rise
Yet the FBI’s actions raise even more questions about how to balance security needs without threatening personal privacy or technological innovation. “I worry about the government mandating backdoors into these kinds of communications, “ said Jennifer Lynch, an attorney at Electronic Freedom Frontier.
Especially since the government is simultaneously trying to expand the scope of its legal surveillance powers, with several pieces of legislation since 2001 having done just that.
The internet community is increasingly skeptical in the wake of protests over the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in January and the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) last month.
CISPA, which passed in the House of Representatives, would allow for the sharing of internet traffic information between the government and certain technology and manufacturing companies.
The White House and surveillance
President Obama for his part has not sent the FBI’s amendments to Capitol Hill yet.
He runs the risk of alienating civil libertarians who supported him in 2008, when he ran on a platform that said as president he would “strengthen privacy protections for the digital age.”
Yet his running mate at the time, then-Senator Joe Biden, in the 1990s introduced a bill at the FBI’s urging that echoes the bureau’s proposal today. It said companies should “ensure that communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text content or voice, data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by law.”
And once in office, Obama has done and can do an about face. After promising to veto the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), for example, he signed it into law on New Year’s Eve.
Back to the future
Industry groups are not likely to back down easily in the face of government pressure.
Tech America, a trade association that includes representatives of HP, eBay, IBM, Qualcomm and other companies on its board of directors, has been lobbying against a CALEA expansion, saying it would “represent a sea change in government surveillance law, imposing significant compliance costs on both traditional and non-traditional communications companies.
Not to mention the response from the American Civil Liberties Union. Said Legislative Counsel Christopher Calabrese, “Under the guise of a technical fix, the government looks to be taking one more step toward conducting easy dragnet collection of Americans’ most private communications. Mandating that all communications software be accessible to the government is a huge privacy invasion.”
He continued, “With concern over cybersecurity at an all-time high, this proposal will create even more security risks by mandating that our communications have a ‘backdoor’ for government use and will make our online interactions even more vulnerable.”