FBI: We need wiretap-ready Web sites -- now

[GeominorAI]

CNET learns the FBI is quietly pushing its plan to force surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers, and is asking Internet companies not to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory.



The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require the firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance.

In meetings with industry representatives, the White House, and U.S. senators, senior FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities, CNET has learned.

The FBI general counsel's office has drafted a proposed law that the bureau claims is the best solution: requiring that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.

"If you create a service, product, or app that allows a user to communicate, you get the privilege of adding that extra coding," a person who has reviewed the FBI's draft legislation told CNET. The requirements apply only if a threshold of a certain number of users is exceeded, according to a second person briefed on it.

The FBI's proposal would amend a 1994 law, called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, that currently applies only to telecommunications providers, not Web companies. The Federal Communications Commission extended CALEA in 2004 to apply to broadband networks.

FBI Director Robert Muller is not asking companies to support the bureau's CALEA expansion, but instead is "asking what can go in it to minimize impacts," one participant in the discussions says. That included a scheduled trip this month to the West Coast -- which was subsequently postponed -- to meet with Internet companies' CEOs and top lawyers.

A further expansion of CALEA is unlikely to be applauded by tech companies, their customers, or privacy groups. Apple (which distributes iChat and FaceTime) is currently lobbying on the topic, according to disclosure documents filed with Congress two weeks ago. Microsoft (which owns Skype and Hotmail) says its lobbyists are following the topic because it's "an area of ongoing interest to us." Google, Yahoo, and Facebook declined to comment.

In February 2011, CNET was the first to report that then-FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni was planning to warn Congress of what the bureau calls its "Going Dark" problem, meaning that its surveillance capabilities may diminish as technology advances. Caproni singled out "Web-based e-mail, social-networking sites, and peer-to-peer communications" as problems that have left the FBI "increasingly unable" to conduct the same kind of wiretapping it could in the past.

In addition to the FBI's legislative proposal, there are indications that the Federal Communications Commission is considering reinterpreting CALEA to demand that products that allow video or voice chat over the Internet -- from Skype to Google Hangouts to Xbox Live -- include surveillance backdoors to help the FBI with its "Going Dark" program. CALEA applies to technologies that are a "substantial replacement" for the telephone system.

"We have noticed a massive uptick in the amount of FCC CALEA inquiries and enforcement proceedings within the last year, most of which are intended to address 'Going Dark' issues," says Christopher Canter, lead compliance counsel at the Marashlian and Donahue law firm, which specializes in CALEA. "This generally means that the FCC is laying the groundwork for regulatory action."

Subsentio, a Colorado-based company that sells CALEA compliance products and worked with the Justice Department when it asked the FCC to extend CALEA seven years ago, says the FBI's draft legislation was prepared with the compliance costs of Internet companies in mind.

In a statement to CNET, Subsentio President Steve Bock said that the measure provides a "safe harbor" for Internet companies as long as the interception techniques are "'good enough' solutions approved by the attorney general."

Another option that would be permitted, Bock said, is if companies "supply the government with proprietary information to decode information" obtained through a wiretap or other type of lawful interception, rather than "provide a complex system for converting the information into an industry standard format."

A spokesman for the FBI told CNET today that: "(There are) significant challenges posed to the FBI in the accomplishment of our diverse mission. These include those that result from the advent of rapidly changing technology. A growing gap exists between the statutory authority of law enforcement to intercept electronic communications pursuant to court order and our practical ability to intercept those communications. The FBI believes that if this gap continues to grow, there is a very real risk of the government 'going dark' resulting in an increased risk to national security and public safety."

Next steps
The FBI's legislation, which has been approved by the Department of Justice, is one component of what the bureau has internally called the "National Electronic Surveillance Strategy." Documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation show that Going Dark has been a worry inside the bureau since 2006, which employed 107 full-time equivalent people on the project as of 2009, commissioned a RAND study, and sought extensive technical input from the bureau's secretive Operational Technology Division in Quantico, Va. The division boasts of developing the "latest and greatest investigative technologies to catch terrorists and criminals."

But the White House, perhaps less inclined than the bureau to initiate what would likely be a bruising privacy battle, has not sent the FBI's CALEA amendments to Capitol Hill, even though they were expected last year. (A spokeswoman for Sen. Patrick Leahy, head of the Judiciary committee and original author of CALEA, said today that "we have not seen any proposals from the administration.")

Mueller said in December that the CALEA amendments will be "coordinated through the interagency process," meaning they would need to receive administration-wide approval.

Stewart Baker, a partner at Steptoe and Johnson who is the former assistant secretary for policy at Homeland Security, said the FBI has "faced difficulty getting its legislative proposals through an administration staffed in large part by people who lived through the CALEA and crypto fights of the Clinton administration, and who are jaundiced about law enforcement regulation of technology -- overly jaundiced, in my view."

On the other hand, as a senator in the 1990s, Vice President Joe Biden introduced a bill at the FBI's behest, which echoes the bureau's proposal today. Biden's bill said that companies should "ensure that communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by law." (Biden's legislation spurred the public release of PGP, one of the first easy-to-use encryption utilities.)

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment. An FCC spokesman referred questions to the Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, which declined to comment.

From the FBI's perspective, expanding CALEA to cover VoIP, Web e-mail, and social networks isn't expanding wiretapping law: If a court order is required today, one will be required tomorrow as well. Rather, it's making sure that a wiretap is guaranteed to produce results.

But that nuanced argument could prove radioactive among an Internet community already skeptical of government efforts in the wake of protests over the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, in January, and the CISPA data-sharing bill last month. And even if startups or hobbyist projects are exempted if they stay below the user threshold, it's hardly clear how open source or free software projects such as Linphone, KPhone, and Zfone -- or Nicholas Merrill's proposal for a privacy-protective Internet provider -- will comply.

The FBI's CALEA amendments could be particularly troublesome for Zfone. Phil Zimmermann, the creator of PGP who became a privacy icon two decades ago after being threatened with criminal prosecution, announced Zfone in 2005 as a way to protect the privacy of VoIP users. Zfone scrambles the entire conversation from end to end.

"I worry about the government mandating backdoors into these kinds of communications," says Jennifer Lynch, an attorney at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has obtained documents from the FBI relating to its proposed expansion of CALEA.

As CNET was the first to report in 2003, representatives of the FBI's Electronic Surveillance Technology Section in Chantilly, Va., began quietly lobbying the FCC to force broadband providers to provide more-efficient, standardized surveillance facilities. The Federal Communications Commission approved that requirement a year later, sweeping in Internet phone companies that tie into the existing telecommunications system. It was upheld in 2006 by a federal appeals court.

But the FCC never granted the FBI's request to rewrite CALEA to cover instant messaging and VoIP programs that are not "managed"--meaning peer-to-peer programs like Apple's Facetime, iChat/AIM, Gmail's video chat, and Xbox Live's in-game chat that do not use the public telephone network.

If there is going to be a CALEA rewrite, "industry would like to see any new legislation include some protections against disclosure of any trade secrets or other confidential information that might be shared with law enforcement, so that they are not released, for example, during open court proceedings," says Roszel Thomsen, a partner at Thomsen and Burke who represents technology companies and is a member of an FBI study group. He suggests that such language would make it "somewhat easier" for both industry and the police to respond to new technologies.

But industry groups aren't necessarily going to roll over without a fight. TechAmerica, a trade association that includes representatives of HP, eBay, IBM, Qualcomm, and other tech companies on its board of directors, has been lobbying against a CALEA expansion. Such a law would "represent a sea change in government surveillance law, imposing significant compliance costs on both traditional (think local exchange carriers) and nontraditional (think social media) communications companies," TechAmerica said in e-mail today.

Ross Schulman, public policy and regulatory counsel at the Computer and Communications Industry Association, adds: "New methods of communication should not be subject to a government green light before they can be used."

Source: CNET

__________________
Computational intelligence must be implemented on a parallel architecture

[Hard core Rikki]

A marvelous proposition. Backdoors in all communication sites, software and messenging apps? And they even ask site operators and leading services to not oppose that law? Plus, circumventing backdoors would be treated as a felony? Why did this not cross the minds of the shadowy cabal before?
Full support. This has to be the ultimate test in allegiance to the dollar flag.

This reminds, could this have any connection to the DHS stockpiling insane amounts of weaponry and roadblocks for use within mainland America? Whistleblwers suggest services are readying for the prospect of a nationwide uprising.
Crazy times we live in, I know.

"We are Preparing for Massive Civil War," Says DHS Informant

__________________

deviantART | Blog | VBA-M | GeneralEmu | XTemu | FMVTool2 | @ES | Shendo new

NGemu toolbar http://ngemu.ourtoolbar.com

---

Last edited by Hard core Rikki; May 5th, 2012 at 11:51..

[Strike105X]

Friends i give you the prelude to the Internet dark ages.

__________________

DeviantArt|AnimeList|PC Config

[Radix865]

How can they ask that when most of those sites contain information of people outside the US too??? This is bulls**t!

I think it's time for other countries to tell them to go f**k themselves, although I doubt it.

__________________

[SCHUMI_4EVER]

I'm pretty sure any people the FBI might need to know about aren't actually stupid enough to use service this open and public and likely to be monitored and thus only the common everyday guy will get screwed over for petty nonsense.

__________________

Intel Core2Quad Q9550 (2.83Ghz stock) | ASUS P5Q | 2x2GB Transcend JetRam DDR2-800 | ASUS ENGTX260\HDTP\896M | Windows Vista Home Premium 64bit SP1

The Champ has retired but may his Legacy live on FOREVER !!!!

No$GBA DS FAQ 2.0

Get it right fools! The glass is HALF-EMPTY, not half-full!!!

!!! WARNING: Emulation requires a brain !!! WARNING: Emulation =/= Piracy !!!

[Radix865]

Originally Posted by SCHUMI_4EVER

I'm pretty sure any people the FBI might need to know about aren't actually stupid enough to use service this open and public and likely to be monitored and thus only the common everyday guy will get screwed over for petty nonsense.

Well, the whole point is to just gain control over your everyday people, and we all know, knowledge is power... Even in our "free" society that's really what they want.

__________________

[Ahielia]

Like there isn't many backdoors available as it is.

[the_randomizer]

*Sigh* Words can't describe the fail this government has

__________________
CPU - 3rd Gen Core i5 3570 3.4 GHz (3.8 GHz Turbo Boost)
Extensions - MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, EIST,
AVX, Hyper Threading, Intel VT-x, AES-NI, Turbo Boost 2.0, TXT, Smart Cache
GPU - MSI GeForce GTX 660 2 GB GDDR5
RAM - 8192MB DDR3 SDRAM 1333
OS - Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
HDD - Western Digital 1 TB

"If you call up your local hardware store and ask them how you can put tractor tires onto a 1990 Honda, well there's gonna be some laughter, a visit from the cops, maybe a psychiatric nurse." - Red Green

[unit666]

where the f are my Amendments.

1st Protects the freedom of religion, speech, and the press, as well as the right to assemble and petition the government.
4th Prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and sets out requirements for search warrants based on probable cause.

This countrey based are amendments off of natural rightes meening fundimental human rights certain basic rights that can not be denied by the government. I thot that is wat seperated us from the other countreys.

__________________

Operating System: Windows 7 Home Premium
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2430M CPU @ 2.40GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.4GHz over clocked at 3.0 GHz
Memory: 8192MB RAM
Intel(R) HD Graphics Family
DirectX Version: DirectX 11

[Fadingz]

A. again, why is US getting info on everyone?
B. as if attackers cannot get access to backdoors...

__________________

[Hard core Rikki]

Originally Posted by Fadingz

A. again, why is US getting info on everyone?

To protect its people against China.
Someday they'll really say it with a straight face and swear on the head of their graverobber ancestors.

__________________

deviantART | Blog | VBA-M | GeneralEmu | XTemu | FMVTool2 | @ES | Shendo new

NGemu toolbar http://ngemu.ourtoolbar.com

[Fadingz]

So is US gonna ask for the access to the 'backdoor' of everyone?
I thought there should be no prejudiced/enforcement in sexual orientation.
I do not swing in that direction!

Anyways, how can they have backdoor access to people while no one even has the front door access...
We cannot even know/monitor what the hell they are doing with the info.

__________________

---

Last edited by Fadingz; May 6th, 2012 at 12:50..

[Radix865]

I guess FBI got tired of some zucker-whatever knowing more about people than they do! And now they want a piece of that...

__________________

[Paratech]

Originally Posted by unit666

where the f are my Amendments.

1st Protects the freedom of religion, speech, and the press, as well as the right to assemble and petition the government.
4th Prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and sets out requirements for search warrants based on probable cause.

This countrey based are amendments off of natural rightes meening fundimental human rights certain basic rights that can not be denied by the government. I thot that is wat seperated us from the other countreys.

Hey, they (Supreme Court) said we can be strip searched for ANY REASON.

Thankfully I'm a fat, middle aged, Caucasian male, nobody wants to see me butt naked. Hawt young women however might want to be concerned!

The US police now have the right to sexually harass anyone for any reason.

I guess they want people to have a reason to be police?

__________________

Spoiler:

-Dreams of getting a new 360 XBOX in 201x.
-Current consoles:Wii, Slim PS2, also has 3DS / GBA SP and a PSP 3000

-PC: AMD Quad Core A8-3800 Accelerated Processor, 16GB DDR3 Ram, Radeon HD45xx 1 GB video card, 1 TB hard drive, 500 GB hard drive, Supermulti DVD Burner, Wireless Lan 802.11 b/g/n, Beats audio Studio Quality sound, Win 7 Home Premium

Yes, I like getting (primarily digital) games on sale @ bargain prices! don't like it? Just deal with it!

[Fadingz]

But the FCC never granted the FBI's request to rewrite CALEA to cover instant messaging and VoIP programs that are not "managed"--meaning peer-to-peer programs like Apple's Facetime, iChat/AIM, Gmail's video chat, and Xbox Live's in-game chat that do not use the public telephone network.

I am so glad that XBox live should not be not taped, or the FBI would think that we are planning an attack by listening to the chat in BF, Halo, CoD, and etc.

__________________

[blueshogun96]

Originally Posted by unit666

where the f are my Amendments.

1st Protects the freedom of religion, speech, and the press, as well as the right to assemble and petition the government.
4th Prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and sets out requirements for search warrants based on probable cause.

This countrey based are amendments off of natural rightes meening fundimental human rights certain basic rights that can not be denied by the government. I thot that is wat seperated us from the other countreys.

Gah, when will Americans ever learn?? The US was NEVER a free country to begin with, not in 1776, not in 1865, not in 1920, not ever! The constitution is just a piece of paper, and since when does a piece of paper protect your rights? Either you fight for those rights, or you get none, simple as that.

The government has been circumventing the constitution since 1913, when they enforced the federal income tax. To this day, it is unconstitutional to have ANY sort of income tax except on corporate gains and there is absolutely NO law saying that you must pay this tax (I'll believe it when I see it). The problem is that Americans are so unaware of the fact that they are being robbed blind, that they could lose their citizenship overnight while being dazed in front of the idiot box known as the TV because they're too worried about what's going on with Kim Kardashi-cuunt!

Sorry for ranting, but it's baffling how people cannot see how the US is heading towards becoming one big police state since 9/11/2001...

Originally Posted by Fadingz

I am so glad that XBox live should not be not taped, or the FBI would think that we are planning an attack by listening to the chat in BF, Halo, CoD, and etc.

I await proof of any REAL terrorists

__________________

Official Website of Shogun3D's RyuAwai!

Shogun3D Game Development Blog

Zengjük a Dalt: Manliest Song Ever!