Colleges protest netwoprk upgrades to allow easier surveillance

[finin]

According to this story, the only complaint from colleges is
the cost.  In addition to ultimate concerns about privacy,
are there also technical issues that might come up, like
adding to latency or congestion?  Many universities are
engaged in building and testing innovative high speed
computation and communication applications and testbeds that
span the Internet.  Would a required re-architecting of
campus networks cause problems for this kind of research?
I'm not expert enough in these areas to have a well informed
opinion. Tim

--

Colleges Protest Call to Upgrade Online Systems
By Sam Dillon and Stephen Labaton, NYT, October 23, 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/23/technology/23college.html?
pagewanted=all

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 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.
...
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.
...
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."
...

--
 Tim Finin, Computer Science & Electrical Engineering, Univ of Maryland
 Baltimore County, 1000 Hilltop Cir, Baltimore MD 21250. finin at umbc.edu
 http://ebiquity.umbc.edu 410-455-3522 fax:-3969 http://umbc.edu/~finin



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