[EPIC_IDOF] CALEA and Colleges

Bruce Schneier schneier at counterpane.com
Sat Oct 22 02:40:49 PDT 2005


New York Times
October 23, 2005

Colleges Protest Call to Upgrade Online Systems
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/technology/23college.html?
hp&ex=1130040000&en=82e2a961640ae05b&ei=5094

By SAM DILLON
and STEPHEN LABATON

The federal government, vastly extending the reach of an 11-year-old
law, is requiring hundreds of universities, online communications
companies and cities to overhaul their Internet computer networks to
make it easier for law enforcement authorities to monitor e-mail and
other online communications.

The action, which the government says is intended to help catch
terrorists and other criminals, has unleashed protests and the threat
of lawsuits from universities, which argue that it will cost them at
least $7 billion while doing little to apprehend lawbreakers. Because
the government would have to win court orders before undertaking
surveillance, the universities are not raising civil liberties issues.

The order, issued by the Federal Communications Commission in August
and first published in the Federal Register last week, extends the
provisions of a 1994 wiretap law not only to universities, but also
to libraries, airports providing wireless service and commercial
Internet access providers.

It also applies to municipalities that provide Internet access to
residents, be they rural towns or cities like Philadelphia and San
Francisco, which have plans to build their own Net access networks.

So far, however, universities have been most vocal in their opposition.

The 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act,
requires telephone carriers to engineer their switching systems at
their own cost so that federal agents can obtain easy surveillance
access.

Recognizing the growth of Internet-based telephone and other
communications, the order requires that organizations like
universities providing Internet access also comply with the law by
spring 2007.

The Justice Department requested the order last year, saying that new
technologies like telephone service over the Internet were
endangering law enforcement's ability to conduct wiretaps "in their
fight against criminals, terrorists and spies."

Justice Department officials, who declined to comment for this
article, said in their written comments filed with the Federal
Communications Commission that the new requirements were necessary to
keep the 1994 law "viable in the face of the monumental shift of the
telecommunications industry" and to enable law enforcement to
"accomplish its mission in the face of rapidly advancing technology."

The F.C.C. says it is considering whether to exempt educational
institutions from some of the law's provisions, but it has not
granted an extension for compliance.

Lawyers for the American Council on Education, the nation's largest
association of universities and colleges, are preparing to appeal the
order before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit, Terry W. Hartle, a senior vice president of the
council, said Friday.

The Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit civil liberties
group, has enlisted plaintiffs for a separate legal challenge,
focusing on objections to government control over how organizations,
including hundreds of private technology companies, design Internet
systems, James X. Dempsey, the center's executive director, said Friday.

The universities do not question the government's right to use
wiretaps to monitor terrorism or criminal suspects on college
campuses, Mr. Hartle said, only the order's rapid timetable for
compliance and extraordinary cost.

Technology experts retained by the schools estimated that it could
cost universities at least $7 billion just to buy the Internet
switches and routers necessary for compliance. That figure does not
include installation or the costs of hiring and training staff to
oversee the sophisticated circuitry around the clock, as the law
requires, the experts said.

"This is the mother of all unfunded mandates," Mr. Hartle said.

Even the lowest estimates of compliance costs would, on average,
increase annual tuition at most American universities by some $450,
at a time when rising education costs are already a sore point with
parents and members of Congress, Mr. Hartle said.

At New York University, for instance, the order would require the
installation of thousands of new devices in more than 100 buildings
around Manhattan, be they small switches in a wiring closet or large
aggregation routers that pull data together from many sites and send
it over the Internet, said Doug Carlson, the university's executive
director of communications and computing services.

"Back of the envelope, this would cost us many millions of dollars,"
Mr. Carlson said.

F.C.C. officials declined to comment publicly, citing their
continuing review of possible exemptions to the order.

Some government officials said they did not view compliance as overly
costly for colleges because the order did not require surveillance of
networks that permit students and faculty to communicate only among
themselves, like intranet services. They also said the schools would
be required to make their networks accessible to law enforcement only
at the point where those networks connect to the outside world.

Educause, a nonprofit association of universities and other groups
that has hired lawyers to prepare its own legal challenge, informed
its members of the order in a Sept. 29 letter signed by Mark A.
Luker, an Educause vice president.

Mr. Luker advised universities to begin planning how to comply with
the order, which university officials described as an extraordinary
technological challenge.

Unlike telephone service, which sends a steady electronic voice
stream over a wire, the transmission of e-mail and other information
on the Internet sends out data packets that are disassembled on one
end of a conversation and reassembled on the other.

Universities provide hundreds of potential Internet access sites,
including lounges and other areas that offer wireless service and
Internet jacks in libraries, dorms, classrooms and laboratories,
often dispersed through scores of buildings.

If law enforcement officials obtain a court order to monitor the
Internet communications of someone at a university, the current
approach is to work quietly with campus officials to single out
specific sites and install the equipment needed to carry out the
surveillance. This low-tech approach has worked well in the past,
officials at several campuses said.

But the federal law would apply a high-tech approach, enabling law
enforcement to monitor communications at campuses from remote
locations at the turn of a switch.

It would require universities to re-engineer their networks so that
every Net access point would send all communications not directly
onto the Internet, but first to a network operations center where the
data packets could be stitched together into a single package for
delivery to law enforcement, university officials said.

Albert Gidari Jr., a Seattle lawyer at the firm Perkins Coie who is
representing Educause, said he and other representatives of
universities had been negotiating with lawyers and technology
officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of
Homeland Security and other agencies since the spring about issues
including what technical requirements universities would need to meet
to comply with the law.

"This is a fight over whether a Buick is good enough, or do you need
a Lexus?" Mr. Gidari said. "The F.B.I. is the lead agency, and they
are insisting on the Lexus."

Law enforcement has only infrequently requested to monitor Internet
communications anywhere, much less on university campuses or
libraries, according to the Center for Democracy and Technology. In
2003, only 12 of the 1,442 state and federal wiretap orders were
issued for computer communications, and the F.B.I. never argued that
it had difficulty executing any of those 12 wiretaps, the center said.

"We keep asking the F.B.I., What is the problem you're trying to
solve?" Mr. Dempsey said. "And they have never showed any problem
with any university or any for-profit Internet access provider. The
F.B.I. must demonstrate precisely why it wants to impose such an
enormously disruptive and expensive burden."

Larry D. Conrad, the chief information officer at Florida State
University, where more than 140 buildings are equipped for Internet
access, said there were easy ways to set up Internet wiretaps.

"But the wild-eyed fear I have," Mr. Conrad said, "is that the
government will rule that this all has to be automatic, anytime,
which would mean I'd have to re-architect our entire campus network."

He continued, "It seems like overkill to make all these institutions
spend this huge amount of money for a just-in-case kind of scenario."

The University of Illinois says it is worried about the order because
it is in the second year of a $20 million upgrade of its campus
network. Peter Siegel, the university's chief information officer,
estimated that the new rules would require the university to buy
2,100 new devices, at a cost of an additional $13 million, to replace
equipment that is brand new.

"It's like you buy a new car, and then the E.P.A. says you have to
buy a new car again," Mr. Siegel said. "You'd say, 'Gee, could I just
buy a new muffler?' "

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