Net Spying Law Has Bloggers Agitated

Nothing quite excites the blogosphere like a threat to its fiefdom. On Friday, Wired magazine's "Threat Level" blog published a reminder that today is the deadline for Internet service providers to comply with a 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), that requires telecommunication companies to build surveillance capabilities into their infrastructure. Federal and state authorities who have obtained wiretapping warrants have access to these "backdoor" methods.

Wired christened today as "Wiretap the Internet Day." It caught on, igniting buzz about the subject this morning. (A trend of the buzz on CALEA appears here.)

But according to annual reports on incidents of wiretapping issued by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, the hype from this particular law may be overplayed. The vast majority of wiretaps granted through this avenue, known as a "Title III" surveillance, are issued for phones. In 2006, only 13 of the 1,714 intercept orders were for electronic communication, down from 23 out of a total of 1,694 in 2005.

But these numbers fail to satisfy Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which advocates for stricter guidelines on electronic surveillance. Rotenberg notes that these figures do not include requests made through the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which was front and center in the debate over the Bush administration's controversial policy of conducting certain wiretaps without court order. The attorney general's office submits annual FISA figures to Congress but does not break them down by medium, so there is no way to know whether more electronic surveillance is occurring through those channels. As Rotenberg notes, the use of FISA orders has spiked since the 9/11 attacks (see graph on EPIC website).

"The larger trend here has been the migration away from the Title III applications toward FISA," Rotenberg says. "From our perspective, we've reached the worst of all possible worlds."

Electronic surveillance, which many argue is a vital tool in catching terrorists (and a variety of other criminals), is at the center of one of the most controversial topics in law enforcement. But the numbers suggest that the arrival of Wiretap the Internet Day is only peripheral to that debate.

--Chris Wilson