The domestic electronic surveillance ball really got rolling under the
Clinton administration, with the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law
Enforcement Act ("CALEA"). CALEA mandated that the telcos aid wiretapping
by installing remote wiretap ports onto their digital switches so that
the switch traffic would be available for snooping by law enforcement.
After CALEA passed, the FBI no longer had to go on-site with
wiretapping equipment in order to tap a lineâo[per thou]they could monitor and
digitally process voice communications from the comfort of the home
office. (The FCC has recently ruled that CALEA covers VOIP services, which means that providers like Vonage will have to find a way to comply.)
CALEA opened up a huge can of worms, and PGP creator Phil Zimmermann
sounded the alarm back in 1999 about where the program was headed:
A year after the CALEA passed, the FBI disclosed plans to require the
phone companies to build into their infrastructure the capacity to
simultaneously wiretap 1 percent of all phone calls in all major U.S.
cities. This would represent more than a thousandfold increase over
previous levels in the number of phones that could be wiretapped. In
previous years, there were only about a thousand court-ordered wiretaps
in the United States per year, at the federal, state, and local levels
combined. It's hard to see how the government could even employ enough
judges to sign enough wiretap orders to wiretap 1 percent of all our
phone calls, much less hire enough federal agents to sit and listen to
all that traffic in real time. The only plausible way of processing
that amount of traffic is a massive Orwellian application of automated
voice recognition technology to sift through it all, searching for
interesting keywords or searching for a particular speaker's voice. If
the government doesn't find the target in the first 1 percent sample,
the wiretaps can be shifted over to a different 1 percent until the
target is found, or until everyone's phone line has been checked for
subversive traffic. The FBI said they need this capacity to plan for
the future. This plan sparked such outrage that it was defeated in
Congress. But the mere fact that the FBI even asked for these broad
powers is revealing of their agenda.
Read the quote above carefully, and see if it doesn't ring any bells
for you. The salient points that Zimmermann makes are these:
- In 1995, back when the Pentium Pro was hot stuff, the FBI
requested the legal authorization to do very high-volume monitoring of
digital calls.
- There's no way for the judicial system to approve warrants for the number of calls that the FBI wanted to monitor.
- The
agency could never hire enough humans to be able to monitor that many
calls simultaneously, which means that they'd have to use voice
recognition technology to look for "hits" that they could then follow
up on with human wiretaps.
It is entirely possible that the NSA technology at issue here is some
kind of high-volume, automated voice recognition and pattern matching
system. Now, I don't at all believe that all international calls are or
could be monitored with such a system, or anything like that. Rather,
the NSA could very easily narrow down the amount of phone traffic that
they'd have to a relatively small fraction of international calls with
some smart filtering. First, they'd only monitor calls where one end of
the connection is in a country of interest. Then, they'd only need the
ability to do a roving random sample of a few seconds from each call in
that already greatly narrowed pool of calls. As Zimmermann describes
above, you monitor a few seconds of some fraction of the calls looking
for "hits," and then you move on to another fraction. If a particular
call generates a hit, then you zero in on it for further real-time
analysis and possible human interception. All the calls can be
recorded, cached, and further examined later for items that may have
been overlooked in the real-time analysis.
11:11:02 PM  PermaLink /
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