FC: Stu Baker: Fox News goes overboard on Internet wiretap story

[Declan McCullagh <declan () well com>]

The Fox News article in question (which did not appear on Politech):

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,37203,00.html
>    WASHINGTON -- The Federal Bureau of Investigation is seeking to
>    broaden considerably its ability to tap into Internet traffic in its
>    quest to root out terrorists, going beyond even the new measures
>    afforded in anti-terror legislation signed by President Bush Friday,
>    according to lawyers familiar with the FBIs plans.
>
>    Stewart Baker, an attorney at the Washington D.C.-based Steptoe &
>    Johnson and a former general consul to National Security Agency, said
>    the FBI has plans to change the architecture of the Internet and route
>    traffic through central servers that it would be able to monitor
>    e-mail more easily.
[...]

********

From: "Baker, Stewart" <SBaker () steptoe com>
To: "'declan () well com'" <declan () well com>
cc: "Albertazzie, Sally" <SAlbertazzie () steptoe com>
Subject: Fox News goes overboard
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2001 09:48:17 -0500

Declan:

Fox News recently reported that the FBI has a plan to change the
architecture of the Internet, centralizing it and providing "a technical
backdoor to the networks of Internet service providers."  Like many others,
I thought this was big news, and rather surprising.  Until I realized that
the reporter only cited one source and that it was, well, me.  Fox News's
claims go beyond the facts I provided to her, and beyond any that I know
about.

To be clear, I believe that the FBI is at work on an initiative to make
Internet communications, indeed any packet data communications, more
susceptible to intercept and more productive of non-content data about
communications -- the sort of "pen register" data that was expressly
approved for Internet communications in the recent antiterrorism bill.  This
initiative will have architectural implications for packet data
communications systems.  The FBI is likely to press providers of those
services to centralize communications in nodes where interception will be
more convenient, and it is likely to call on packet data services to build
systems that provide more information about the communications of their
subscribers.

The vehicle for this initiative is CALEA, the Communications Assistance for
Law Enforcement Act, a 1994 enactment that actually requires telecom
carriers to redesign their networks to provide better wiretap capabilities.
The act is supposed to exempt information services, but the vagueness of
that provision has encouraged the FBI to expand its mandate into packet-data
communications.  The Bureau is now preparing a general CALEA proposal for
all packet-data systems.  While I have not seen it, the Bureau's past
interventions into packet-data and other communications architecture have
had two characteristics -- they have sought more centralization in order to
simplify interception and they have asked providers to generate new data
messages about their subscribers' activities -- messages that are of value
only to law enforcement.

There are real legal and policy questions that should be raised about this
effort.  In my view, it goes beyond what Congress intended in 1994.  And the
implications for Internet users and technologies deserve to be debated.  But
making these points, as I did with Fox News, is not the same as saying that
the FBI has a firm plan to centralize the Internet and build back doors into
all ISP networks.  If Fox News wants to break that story, it will need a
source other than me.

Stewart Baker
Steptoe & Johnson LLP
1330 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036




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