Digital Telephony Passes (Winter, 1994-1995) -------------------------------------------- By Anonymous In the waning minutes of the 103rd Congress - 10:30 p.m. on a Friday night, on the day before they went out of session, Congress approved the law enforcement takeover of the nation's (and the world's, really) phone system to make surveillance easier for themselves. Welcome to the future of communications and don't forget to smile when you bend over, otherwise Big Brother may paddle you also. So What's the Bill All About? If you liked Clipper, you'll love this new law. It requires that all telecommunications providers big and small phone companies and anyone else who wants to provide phone service redesign their old and new phone services with a built-in capability for Big Brother to have remote surveillance capability. To do this, it requires that all the telecom standards-setting bodies set their standards based on the U.S. Department of Justice's requirements. If the bodies don't do it to the liking of the FBI and NSA, the Federal Communications Commission can step in and set the standards themselves. In exchange, the telephone companies got a whopping $500 million in taxpayer money (yours and mine) to play with. Another section of the bill requires that the phone companies buy as much equipment as requested by the FBI to ensure that they will have enough ports to jack into so they can tap in. New York s figures ought to be interesting. There are several provisions that you hackers and phreaks should be interested in. As a "privacy protection" section, it is now illegal to listen in with a scanner on cordless telephones. A "technical amendment" to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act now makes it perfectly legal for system operators to listen in on all electronic communications. No more worrying about those annoying disclaimers that if you logon to a particular computer, you are waiving your right to be left in private. And finally, for you cellular hackers out there, beware: new amendments to 18 USC 1029 (that's the access control fraud law for you uninitiated out there) make it illegal to possess intending to use, sell, or give a cell phone that has been modified to make free calls or to traffic serial numbers, PINs, or the like. What About the "Great Privacy Provisions" in the Bill? In exchange for the most draconian provisions since the 1798 Alien and Sedition Act or the 1940 Smith Act, the DOJ was kind enough to give us a few trivial privacy provisions. Unlike the glowing statements of certain self-interested Trojan horse public interest groups, these really do very little for privacy. There are limits of accessing of transaction records for online services, however, most of the material is available via a subpoena that any government bureaucrat can ask for. For the text of communications, a warrant is required but it is not a standard warrant. Now it's also illegal to listen in on cordless telephones without a warrant. Does anyone really believe that with more than 100 million scanners out there that this provides any meaningful privacy protection? As long as the government tries to prevent the dissemination of cryptography, we cannot really expect meaningful communications privacy over wireless systems. Why Did It Pass? To put it bluntly, we were sold down the river. The FBI, with additional support from the CIA, the NSA, the Naval Intelligence, lobbied heavily for the bill. FBI Director Freeh even met personally with almost every member of Congress. When the final votes were taken, no recorded votes were tallied so there are no fingerprints for angry constituents. The phone companies took the half billion and rolled over without a whimper. Oh, sure they carped a bit about how much more it would cost but they were really setting the stage to get more money from the public tit in three years when the first money dried up. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, once a proud, principled group dedicated to civil liberties, is now funded completely by corporations such as AT&T, Bell Atlantic, MCI, and IBM. They followed the wishes of their corporate masters and cut a deal, then claimed victory for trivial privacy protections. At the last minute, EFF cofounder John Perry Barlow called Senator Malcolm Wallop, who was planning to kill the bill, and asked him to allow the bill to pass. Barlow said in comments on The Well that he wasn't proud of what he did but that it "was the price of growing up." As if selling one's soul to Satan was a sign of maturity. The FBI told senators' aides who were concerned about the bill after the public campaign organized by EPIC and Voters Telecom Watch, that "EFF supported the bill so there are no privacy concerns." Many people are still wondering if the lead content in the water fountains at their fancy new downtown offices had been checked lately. What to Look Forward to Now? Even before this bill passed, FBI Director Louis Freeh suggested that if the Clipper Chip didn't become as widely successful as the NSA and FBI would like, he would come back to Congress and ask for a ban of all cryptography that they don t keep the keys for. Already a bill was introduced last month that would give the NSA and FBI significant roles in setting all new crypto standards. It doesn't seem terribly unlikely that next year, maybe the year following, we'll see another push on the hill by the FBI in the guise of a "technical amendment" to extend this bill to all online services. After all, we all know that there are a lot of nasty, dirty, dangerous people using Usenet, IRC, and gopher and shouldn't they be tapped like everyone else. Anyway, don't just take my word or anyone else's for it, read the bill yourself. You can get a copy via ftp/wais/gopher/www from: cpsr.org/cpsr/privacy/communications/wiretap/ hr4922_final.txt