Forwarded From: Nicholas Charles Brawn <ncb05at_private> 31Aug98 USA: BIG BROTHER WANTS TO WATCH. By Wickham, Rhonda L. The FBI has been floating its legislative recommendation to rewrite the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) before members of the Senate. I suppose the FBI wants to see if it can make its outrageous requests fly. While this goes on, you should feel more than a little trepidation, first as a citizen and then as a carrier. If the FBI has its way, a large portion of your right to privacy as an American citizen will be snatched away from you. As a carrier, you will lose lots of money and watch your reputation disintegrate. One of the key provisions of the FBI's amendment asks for more accessibility to all citizens' private information. If there is a suspicious event that the FBI deems as an "emergency," it simply could call up a carrier, access your records and obtain your whereabouts for the past two days. If that isn't bad enough, the FBI also wanted to require wireless carriers to provide recordings of any conversations during that period. All of this information would be made available from the carrier simply because any member of law enforcement asked. As a law-abiding citizen, save my occasional speeding tickets, I really wasn't alarmed with the locating requirements. I figured I didn't go anywhere that I would be embarrassed for anyone to know. However, when I found out that any law enforcement officer potentially could summon all of this information as well as my voice records simply by asking, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Every citizen's telephone calls, both wireless and wireline, deserve to be private unless they choose to make them public. CTIA has been active and vocal in its protests against the FBI's view. As well it should be. Aside from the pure invasion of privacy, consider what happens to wireless carriers if the FBI gets to "watch" whomever they want whenever they want. Carriers would have to implement massive equipment changes in order to accommodate these law-enforcement capabilities. According to a CTIA spokesperson, it represents so much money across both the wireless and wireline industries, the association hasn't even tried to tag on a monetary value. If the tab is that large, carriers would have no choice but to pass the cost onto subscribers. Not only would citizens lose some of their privacy, they would be paying carriers to subsidize the government's ability to do it. To be fair, the FBI offered a plan for distributing some $500 million to help carriers upgrade and replace their equipment to meet these requirements. However, it wants to designate dollars on a pro-rata basis. Carriers with the largest number of customers at a given time would receive the largest percentage of it. Obviously, if that "given time" was 1995, the large cellular carriers stood to gain a larger portion of the dough than the new PCS carriers. If PCS carriers then had to foot the FBI's surveillance bill without substantial assistance, it may have been the last straw, large-ticket item that drove them into obscurity and extinction. In the American tradition, the good guys always have been required to prove they had reasonable cause to intrude on someone's privacy. They needed to then obtain court documents that granted them permission to invade someone's privacy. The FBI's latest attempt at rewriting CALEA would absolve agents of carrying this burden of justification on their own shoulders. If the FBI won its way to "watch," it would not only jack up costs to carriers and dampen competition overall. It also would cast the telephone carrier as a conspiratorial bad guy who would willingly open up each citizen's telephone account for scrutiny and possible prosecution. -o- Subscribe: mail majordomoat_private with "subscribe isn". Today's ISN Sponsor: Repent Security Incorporated [www.repsec.com]
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