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The Obama Administration wants Congress to make all services that provide communications, including e-mail transmitters using encrypted messages to be able to comply if served with a wiretap warrant. These include BlackBerry, social Web sites, such as Facebook, and software that permits “peer to peer” messaging, like Skype.
Skype is an application allowing users to make voice calls over the Internet, even overseas calls. To counter the terrorism threat, it was recently revealed that companies such as AT&T, Verizon, and MCI had been working closely with the F.B.I. for years to skirt the wiretap law in order to find terror plots before they were carried out. The companies even set up remote terminals in the F.B.I offices, staffing them with telecom experts. So-called “exigent letters” were used to ask for information on an emergency basis without a subpoena.
In a report in January, the Justice Department Inspector General criticized the practice as illegal. But the report also revealed that, surprisingly enough, the Obama Administration had issued a secret retroactive order saying it was legal for the F.B.I. to have dodged federal privacy protections. How that must wrench the insides of ACLU fanatics. F.B.I. employees got the phone records “to perform their critical mission to prevent a terrorist attack or support a counterterrorist investigation,” the agency explained.
Under the law currently, if a communications carrier provides security officials with the content of a phone call or e-mail plus information as to its recipient, the time and location, it can’t be fined. If a company does not meet these requirements, it can be fined by a judge or the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). But neither option has been invoked, law enforcement officials say, because the goal is to get the problem fixed.
An internet-based voting system in Washington, D.C., was recently hacked into by University of Michigan researchers. The hack enabled them even to change votes. The hack was invited but was unnoticed by election officials until the researchers told them what they had done. Washington began testing its Internet voting system Oct. 5. It was designed to let overseas military cast ballots quickly instead of relying on the postal system to issue ballots in time to meet voting deadlines. If technology provides the ability to change election votes, another threat to our democratic system is at hand.
All of which shows not only the dilemma of balancing Internet development with wiretaps for national security, but also the necessity for the United States to be unhampered in its drive to be the world’s wireless technology leader for peaceful and military needs–as well as to protect lawful voting.
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