Why U.S. News is Wrong About Internet Taps

U.S. News and World Report says THREAT LEVEL needs to take a chill pill on the issue of internet surveillance. "Nothing quite excites the blogosphere like a threat to its fiefdom," zings reporter Chris Wilson, who claims that last Monday's deadline for broadband providers to become wiretap friendly is mostly a nonevent, given how rare internet wiretaps are.

Wired christened today as "Wiretap the Internet Day." It caught on, igniting buzz about the subject this morning. ...

But according to annual reports on incidents of wiretapping issued by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the hype from this particular law may be overplayed. The vast majority of wiretaps granted through this avenue, known as a "Title III" surveillance, are issued for phones. In 2006, only 13 of the 1,714 intercept orders were for electronic communication, down from 23 out of a total of 1,694 in 2005.

But Wilson misses the truth in those numbers, as surely as he misses our original point: the quick and easy wiretapping ushered in by CALEA results in more domestic surveillance. Since the deadline for internet CALEA compliance was this week -- and time moves forward, not backwards -- internet surveillance numbers are still low compared to telephone surveillance, which has had CALEA for years.

Here's the 10-year view on (non-FISA) court ordered surveillance.

See that dramatic climb beginning in 2002? That's when the deadline for telephone CALEA compliance hit. Criminal court ordered surveillance has grown 35% from that mark -- from 1,358 orders in 2002, to 1,839 last year. Secret FISA orders have climbed even more dramatically, from 1,228 in 2002, to 2,176 last year.

Wilson misses more evidence in the reports. Notwithstanding the deadline, 80 - 90% of wireline telephone switches aren't CALEA compliant (tsk ...), but cell phone switches are -- 100% of them, according to a report (.pdf) last year by the Justice Department's inspector general. Guess where all the wiretaps are? That's right, in 2006, surveillance was approved on 48 hardwired home phones, 13 businesses, and a whopping 1,686 CALEA-complaint cell phones and pagers, where police can start listening the very day a judge signs off on the order. (The actual number of taps is higher and unknown, since one order can cover multiple phones).

Bottom line: Making surveillance fast and simple invariably makes it more attractive to cops and spooks, who might otherwise have to run down leads and pursue investigations with shoe leather. Broadband CALEA will mean the internet is spied on more -- a lot more, we think. Whether that's a good thing or bad depends on your point of view.