Stew Baker: Fox News goes overboard

[Elyn Wollensky]

For those who haven't seen the Baker rebuttal, that Declan mentioned, here
it is-
elyn

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>
>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