Stu Baker on CALEA and the Net

[Greg Broiles]

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 at 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 at well.com
"We have found and closed the thing you watch us with." -- New Delhi street kids