(2013-04-25) Increased Wiretap Amnesty

Senior Obama administration officials have secretly authorized the interception of communications carried on portions of networks operated by ATT and other Internet service providers (ISP), a practice that might otherwise be illegal under federal wiretapping (WireTap) laws. Shades of 2008-02-16-FisaTelcoAmnestyBattle.

*"The Justice Department is helping private companies evade federal wiretap laws," said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), which obtained over 1,000 pages of internal government documents and provided them to CNET this week. "Alarm bells should be going off."

A report (PDF) published last month by the Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan arm of Congress, says the executive branch likely does not have the legal authority to authorize more widespread monitoring of communications unless Congress rewrites the law. "Such an executive action would contravene current federal laws protecting electronic communications," the report says.

Because it overrides all federal and state privacy laws, including the Wiretap Act, legislation called C[[ISPA]] would formally authorize the program without the government resorting to 2511 letters. In other words, if C[[ISPA]], which the U.S. House of Representatives approved last week, becomes law, any data-sharing program would be placed on a solid legal footing. AT&T, Verizon, and wireless and cable providers have all written letters endorsing C[[ISPA]].

"These agencies are clearly seeking authority to receive a large amount of information, including personal information, from private Internet networks," says EPIC staff attorney Amie Stepanovich.

In January, the Department of Homeland Security's privacy office published a privacy analysis (PDF) of the program saying that users of the networks of companies participating in the program will see "an electronic login banner [saying] information and data on the network may be monitored or disclosed to third parties, and/or that the network users' communications on the network are not private." *