Feds Deny Report Of Widespread Spying

The FBI's internet surveillance methods aren't as targeted as the government claims and often sweeps in whole swaths of an Internet Service Provider's traffic, according to a presentation Friday by a former attorney in the Justice Department's Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section as reported by News.com. But the feds say nothing of the sort is happening.

Instead of targeting a specific person or Internet Protocol address that identifies a specific computer, agents are recording wide ranges of internet traffic at an ISP. They then put it in a database and filter it later, which means that the traffic of innocent Americans is being captured by the FBI, according to Paul Ohm.

Ohm said that full-pipe recording has become federal agents' default method for Internet surveillance. "You collect wherever you can on the (network) segment," he said. "If it happens to be the segment that has a lot of IP addresses, you don't throw away the other IP addresses. You do that after the fact."

"You intercept first and you use whatever filtering, data mining to get at the information about the person you're trying to monitor," he added.

Full story.

It's not clear that such a technique would be legal and it is reminiscent of the warrrantless wiretapping by the NSA.

For its part, the Justice Department says that no such thing is happening.

The article is inaccurate. Nothing has changed from our long-standing practice in implementing court-authorized law enforcement interception orders. The FBI records and retains only that data which it is authorized under law to record and retain -- namely, the communications associated with facilities targeted pursuant to a court order.

That's a pretty strong response. Ohm isn't a crackpot -- he's a law professor at the University of Colorado. And Declan McCullagh, the News.com reporter who penned the story, has been following technology and surveillance policy for a decade. I'll see what else I can find to figure this one out. One possibility is that the secret rooms that former AT&T technician Mark Klein discovered were actually for the FBI, not the NSA.