Eavesdropping on the Wiretappers

Thomas Greene filed a great story in Wired News today on his crashing of the wiretapping/eavesdropping convention known as ISS World.

While spending three days drinking beers and smoking cigarettes to get the scoop, Greene managed to rip a copy of the CD presentations to his hard drive and drink his way into a conversation with engineers who make snooping products that can land in the clutches of dictators.

"Well, it's quite an issue," I said. "This is the equipment of totalitarianism, and the only things that can keep a population safe are decent law and proper oversight. I want to know what they think when they learn that China, or Syria, or Zimbabwe is getting their hands on it."

"You really need to educate yourself," he insisted. "Do you think this stuff doesn't happen in the West? Let me tell you something. I sell this equipment all over the world, especially in the Middle East. I deal with buyers from Qatar, and I get more concern about proper legal procedure from them than I get in the USA."

"Well, perhaps the Qataris are conscientious," I said, "and I'm prepared to take your word on that, but there are seriously oppressive governments out there itching to get hold of this stuff."

He sneered again. "Do you think for a minute that Bush would let legal issues stop him from doing surveillance? He's got to prevent a terrorist attack that everyone knows is coming. He'll do absolutely anything he thinks is going to work. And so would you. So why are you bothering these guys?"

"It's a valid question," I insisted. "This is powerful stuff. In the wrong hands, it could ruin political opponents; it could make the state's power impossible to challenge. The state would know basically everything. People would be getting rounded up for thought crimes."

Now, I'm a little jealous since I wanted to go to this conference and had a long conversation with one Tatiana Lucas, who identified herself as the director of the ISS World conference.

Lucas told me that press wasn't allowed in the conference.

"We have nothing to hide," Lucas said. "We just do not want any distractions."

Lucas went on to say that press wasn't allowed to go to ISS World any more because they were too dumb to understand CALEA.

"The press has a tendency to misquote," Lucas said, heaping particular scorn on USA Today's story about BellSouth and Verizon working with the NSA, which both companies have since denied.

Lucas added the press would only distract law enforcement officials from bastions of openness such as Russia, Pakistan and Bahrain (a country where it is illegal to criticize the state religion or the king and, all emails and phone calls are monitored, according to the U.S. State Department).

But Lucas said she might be able to accommodate our request for a press pass "if you help us to promote our conference."

Hearing me take notes, Lucas oddly then accused me of violating her rights by 'recording her' (one would think the director of a conference about 'lawful intercepts' would know the difference between taking notes and recording a phone call). She then accused me of being rude and asked for my editor's name and phone number.

She promised she'd have her boss, one Dr. Jerry Lucas, call me back to discuss why the conference, devoted to issues that are very much in the news, was closed to the press.

When she called my editor, she made the same promise.

Of course, Dr. Lucas never called back, we never got the press pass, but Thomas Greene still got the story.

And it turned out to be probably more damning than the one that would have been told by a reporter inside the convention.

It's ironic that spooks so often remind us that we've got nothing to fear from their activities if we've got nothing nasty to hide, while they themselves are rarely comfortable without multiple layers of secrecy, anonymity and plausible deniability. While there was little or nothing at the conference worth keeping secret, the sense of paranoia was constant. The uniformed guard posted to the entrance was there to intimidate, not to protect. [...]

The project of "lawful interception" is huge, grotesquely expensive, controversial, infused with unnecessary secrecy and often useless against the most important suspects it purports to target.

It poses a tremendous threat to human rights and dignity in countries without adequate legal safeguards, and still invites occasional abuses in countries with them. Its costs are paid by citizens who are deliberately kept in the dark about how much they're paying for it, how effective it is in fighting crime and how susceptible it is to abuse. And that's the way the entire cast of characters involved wants to keep it.

Full story.

Tags: ISSWorld, ISS, NSA