Pruning Shears

It was a mixed bag this week, which is a welcome change from the “Bag of Pure Evil” that all other recent weeks have been.  First the bad news.  In two articles from Wired we learned that “[t]he FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device” and also about the NSA’s “‘secret room’ inside AT&T’s San Francisco switching office”.  In the first article the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been pushing for more information and made some headway.  The second describes AT&T’s “fast packet-detection and inspection capability” and says:

“Anything that comes through (an internet protocol network), we can record,” says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. “We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their (voice over internet protocol) calls.”

Before you say “don’t you want them to listen to Osama’s phone calls” let me point out that he’s still alive so clearly the folks in the clown car haven’t made killing him Job One and second of all even if that kind of indiscriminate sweep increased the chances of getting him the fact that there’s no paper trail virtually guarantees abuses like this:

The F.B.I. cast a much wider net in its terrorism investigations than it has previously acknowledged by relying on telecommunications companies to analyze phone-call patterns of the associates of Americans who had come under suspicion, according to newly obtained bureau records.  The documents indicate that the Federal Bureau of Investigation used secret demands for records to obtain data not only on individuals it saw as targets but also details on their “community of interest” — the network of people that the target was in contact with.
Some legal analysts and privacy advocates suggested that the disclosure of the F.B.I.’s collection of community of interest records offered another example of the bureau exceeding the substantial powers already granted it by Congress.

 On a happier note:

The Homeland Security Department scrapped an ambitious anti-terrorism data-mining tool after investigators found it was tested with information about real people without required privacy safeguards.
The department has spent $42 million since 2003 developing the software tool known as ADVISE, the Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight and Semantic Enhancement program, at the Lawrence Livermore and Pacific Northwest national laboratories. It was intended for wide use by DHS components, including immigration, customs, border protection, biological defense and its intelligence office.

Presumably they went with ADVISE because they couldn’t find an acronym for PUPPY.  In more good news “[a] federal judge struck down parts of the revised USA Patriot Act on Thursday, saying investigators must have a court’s approval before they can order Internet providers to turn over records without telling customers.” and in a third happy development:

The chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security today questioned the legal basis of a new Bush administration plan to expand domestic law enforcement agencies’ access to powerful satellite and aircraft sensor surveillance technology, contending that the administration has failed to build in adequate privacy safeguards for Americans.

We’ll see if the rulings hold up and if the questioning actually leads to anything, but I say we should be happy for anything encouraging that happens.  And I’ll say once again that ISP’s, telecom companies or anyone else that breaks the law because Bush said “boo” deserves no special consideration or leniency.  We are a nation of laws not men and if it means a hard fall for even our most exalted private enterprises so be it.