CALEA, Wiretaps, and you

From Random Hipatia

I remember an innocent bygone era when one could still tell a wiretap by the clicking sound on your phone. Indeed, I spent my early youth as a, ahem, early “telephone enthusiast”, having constructed my first red box at age 12, and in under a year progressed to having a map of every remaining cross-bar exchange in the country, as well as engaging in initial “voyages of exploration” in what was then still “arpa-net”. While other kids subscribed to “Boys Life”, I received “TAPS”.

For those who may recall as far back as the Nixon era, wiretaps at one time used to be a clumsy process indeed. The legal process was never a major hurdle, for finding a complaint judge to issue a wiretap subpoena somewhere is not at all hard to do. There was never real judicial “oversight”, as the only “oversight” that occurred was no doubt that brief time between being presented with the subpoena and providing the desired signature. But even this already expedient process has been eviscerated by the “Patriot Act”. In any case, back then, the real challenge was in the installation of the tap itself.

I learned much about the legal process of wiretapping in that era from my late grandfather, who happened to be an attorney that worked on civil rights cases in the Chicago area. That is to say, he was a subject of FBI wiretaps, and often had clients who were similarly targeted. I am sure in the dusty shelves of Hoover’s old files there is a folder with his name in it.

Certainly it was far easier to tap a premise directly back then. But the appropriate electronics still being large and bulky, this was often rather impractical. Rather, agents, or people like Nixon’s “plumbers” of that bygone age would often go to the local switching center. This might involve tracking down thousands of wires, trying to find the right pair in the local central office. Automatic equipment was initially scarce, so presumably in that time someone would have to sit around and actually wait for a call to be placed, then hook up or start the tape recorder. This was one of the causes of the famous clicking.

Indeed, the old Moscow international phone exchange office, looking to offer better service in wiretapping, offered the most amusing solution of all; that of assuring there were sufficient KGB agents available to listen into each and every international call. Indeed the number of simultaneous international calls that could in that time be placed into and out of the old Soviet Union depended on how much staff was available to listen in the Moscow exchange.

The advent and deployment of modern electronic switching equipment for central offices (and wide use of even early micro-electronics) largely has eliminated the traditional hurdles to effective wiretapping today. Indeed, wiretaps can be achieved automatically at your telephone switching center, no clicking involved, or of course with very small devices that are now much easier to plant within a phone, or outside a premise. For later “telephone enthusiasts”, there was of course interest in “remote observation”, which really was believed to be an early automatic remote intercept service. However, these things pale in comparison to CALEA.

CALEA, better known as the “Computer Assistance for Law Enforcement Act”, among other things, mandates that all new telephone switching equipment legally sold and installed in the U.S. to offer “telephony services to the general public” must include backdoors and remote wiretapping capability that cannot be observed or monitored by the telephone switching staff. CALEA mandates a technical solution that cannot be monitored and that does not happen to recognize the idea of oversight. It is a little late to get upset about this aspect of CALEA now, as this mandate has been in effect under force of law since 1994, and most central offices now have CALEA compliant switching equipment already in place. Indeed, America is already pre-wired for a totalitarian state!

Since CALEA was claimed to be absolutely “necessary” for criminal law enforcement, lets look at this claim objectively. Every year, in the United States, there are less then 1000 wiretap warrants issued for lawful criminal investigations. To engage in such a limited number of lawful investigations is not an unreasonably burden or unduly costly using pre-existing means that would have still preserved the rights, liberties, and privacy of the American population as a whole. In contrast, CALEA, especially in conjunction with the patriot acts, enables our government and police forces to arbitrary spy and intercept lawful communications between arbitrary individuals without any judicial oversight whatsoever, and through enabled technical solutions, to do so not only with greater ease, but also on a much larger scale than ever before possible.

Of course, since technical implementations of CALEA mandate wiretapping through technical means that are outside of the scope and supervision of the service providers themselves, such a system is not only a further danger to our once democratic society, but also offers the possibility of criminal exploitation as well. Whether it offers the corrupt local official or mob boss potentially using CALEA enabled backdoors to blackmail political enemies over private conduct, or permits our national government to eavesdrop on the entire membership of organizations countrywide who may be engaged in legitimate political dissent, CALEA itself is fundamentally incompatible with a functioning democratic society.

Having subdued telephone companies long ago, already existing CALEA mandates are being pushed to create mandated backdoors for wiretapping in areas outside of traditional telephony. VOIP service providers are an obvious target, but so are providers are traditional internet connection services. Indeed, internet enabled services offer a much more convenient means of remote wiretap. However, the internet is thankfully still peerable, which means endpoints could be constructed that can communicate directly, and, ideally, using cryptographic means. This will remain true so long as it remains legally possible to create and distribute software that does not include wiretapping backdoors. I do fear even such a basic right as that will eventually be eliminated by today’s fascist political elite. Clearly, the “castrated” computer client platform (Palladium, or “secure computing base”) would be a place to eliminate such basic rights, as well as other important rights, in the quest for DRM control by outside parties over the computers people own and operate today.