At 05:37 PM 10/18/2001 -0700, Declan McCullagh wrote:
I haven't read the CALEA text in a long time, but I think the answer may be yes and no. Stu is a very smart guy, one of the experts on this section of the law, but he could conceivably be overstating the case for his own purposes.
-Declan
At 05:32 PM 10/18/01 -0400, mikecabot@fastcircle.com wrote:
So is this guy (Stu Baker) just blowing smoke?
I didn't see anywhere where Stu Baker said that he thought this was constitutional and/or within the original text of CALEA - the quoted bits I saw had him saying that the FBI is drafting regulations which proceed on the assumption that they can consider ISP's within CALEA's regulatory reach. He talked about the FBI's position, not his position. I don't think he's likely to take a hard-and-fast stance one way or the other on this; he's way too smart to get hung out to dry with a totally ridiculous position on a black-or-white legal or factual (or political) question. I don't agree with his balancing of security vs. privacy when answering policy questions, but he's also very good at what he does and represents his clients well; a former employer of mine got some help from him which was a godsend at the time, despite what I suspect was his personal opposition (or at least ambivalence) towards our mission. He's a gun-for-hire, not a doctrinaire blinders-on true believer for either the surveillance enthusiasts or privacy freaks. If he's talking about the FBI's reading of CALEA so that it reaches ISP's, that may be a good early warning that we're likely to see lots of the Beltway crew agreeing - the question is not whether some random cypherpunk thinks that's a fair reading of CALEA, the question is whether or not a federal judge thinks that's a fair reading, and things like this are valuable clues if you're interested in that narrow question. CALEA implementation has been slow - if the FBI is drafting regs now, they're going to have to go through the administrative rulemaking process (which I expect they can abbreviate in an "emergency"), publish final regs, and give ISP's at least a short time to comply - so we're still talking about months or years, not hours or days, so it's way too early for tech people to expect to hear about this via work. -- Greg Broiles gbroiles@well.com "We have found and closed the thing you watch us with." -- New Delhi street kids