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Domestic Spying Bill Approved

Posted by samc on August 4th, 2007

Truth, like art, is in the eye of the beholder.
– Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

The U.S. House completed congressional passage of anti-terrorist legislation (the Protect America Act of 2007), giving President George Bush more power to conduct electronic surveillance for the next six months, reports Bloomberg (Baltimore Sun’s Siobhan Gorman video).

According to the NY Times, many calls and e-mail messages between people outside the United States are routed over data networks that run through the United States. In principle, the surveillance law does not restrict eavesdropping on foreign-to-foreign communications. But in practice, administration officials contend, the path of those calls through this country means the government cannot monitor them without a warrant.

The legislation makes changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. The bill would allow the interception and recording of electronic communications involving, people “reasonably believed to be outside the United States” without a court’s order or oversight.

The House voted 227-183 to let spy agencies intercept — without a court warrant — e-mails and telephone calls of foreign-based terrorists that are routed through U.S. telephone switching facilities. Just 41 Democrats joined 186 Republicans to pass the legislation. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland were among 181 Democrats to vote against it.

The Senate approved the Republican plan late yesterday after negotiations between the Democratic-controlled Congress and the Bush administration failed to produce a compromise.

Democrats accused the Bush administration of using scare tactics to steamroll Congress into passing legislation they said undercuts civil liberties.

“This bill makes Alberto Gonzales the sheriff, the judge and the jury,” said Oregon Democrat David Wu, referring to Bush’s attorney general.

California Republican Dan Lungren said Democrats are using “rhetoric that scares the American people into believing that somehow we are tearing up the Constitution.”

In the Senate, Lieberman and 16 Democrats voted for the Republican plan, helping give it the 60 votes needed to pass. Twenty-eight senators opposed it. A Democratic alternative failed 45-43. The provision expires in six months, giving Congress time to consider a broader rewrite of surveillance law.

The Democratic alternatives would have required a court order to authorize interceptions of e-mails and phone calls of foreign-based terrorists routed through U.S. telephone switching points.

But how do you define “intercept”.

“Pin registers” record all outgoing phone numbers. A trap and trace device records all incoming phone numbers. They are often used in concert, especially in the context of Internet communications, says WikiPedia. Police agencies have more leeway when conversations are not recorded.

The NSA has a massive database of Americans’ phone calls, according to USA Today.

Domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.

Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers’ names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA’s domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.

“It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person.

Paul Butler, a former U.S. prosecutor who specialized in terrorism crimes, said FISA approval generally isn’t necessary for government data-mining operations. “FISA does not prohibit the government from doing data mining,” said Butler, now a partner with the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington, D.C.

The caveat, he said, is that “personal identifiers” — such as names, Social Security numbers and street addresses — can’t be included as part of the search. “That requires an additional level of probable cause,” he said.

The International Mobile Subscriber Identification number is your unique cell phone serial number. It is transmitted with every call you make.

Unlike actual conversations, which would require a FISA court order and large technical resources to “mine”, digital control data for cell calls, as well as location, time and phone numbers, can be intercepted, archived and mined with relative ease.

Whistle-blower Mark Klein allegedly learned that AT&T was installing Narus boxes in secure, NSA-controlled rooms in switching centers around the country.

RFID/WiFi is currently used for inmate tracking. Automated license plate readers and RFID tags on drivers licenses might be read by magnetic loops buried in highways (right). Washington State is using long-range RFID — which provides a read-range of 30 to 70 feet — in driver’s licenses. A surveillance state could be possible — and cost/effective.

It wouldn’t be very Democratic, of course.

AUVSI’s Unmanned Systems North America 2007, the largest show of its kind, will bring together all unmanned disciplines including air, ground, and maritime next week for the most extensive display of unmanned systems, ever.