Ok, I don’t blog a lot about my job. For that matter, I don’t blog a LOT about politics. But on my drive home today, I heard a quote from President Bush that was so outrageous that I have to blog about it, and to do so meaningfully, I have to also blog about my job.
Please note that these are my personal opinion, in no way authorized or made official by my employer. I do not speak for my employer; I am only speaking for myself.
You may be aware that the President is in a huge fight right now with the House of Representatives about a particular, narrow expansion of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. That’s the law that authorizes the government to conduct surveillance of people who are suspected of being agents of foreign powers, who are within the United States.
FISA has been around since 1978, but it got expanded considerably shortly after September 11. In fact, the federal government got a lot of additional power to investigate “foreign intelligence” — far beyond what they could do when they had to demonstrate that the standards for criminal investigations were being met.
Right now, the biggest issue that the President has drawn a line in the sand over, is whether or not companies that provided the government with surveillance over their customers WITHOUT AN ORDER FROM THE FISA COURT OR ANY OTHER SEARCH WARRANT OR SURVEILLANCE ORDER should be immune from being sued for handing over all that personal information about their customers with no legal authority requiring them to do so.
The President says that companies should be immune from being sued for violating their privacy policies and customer agreements, which generally state that they’ll only give over such information and access with a legally valid and binding request. (The exact language varies from company to company.)
My friends, that is a crock.
I cannot tell you whether or not my company ever received a request like this, or a national security related court order. For good reasons, the law prohibits companies from discussing such orders, even to the point of acknowledging whether or not they have been served on a particular company.
But I can tell you this: It is my job to process all requests for information about our customers from law enforcement agencies.
The vast majority of the requests I get are involving either investigations of identity theft, stolen laptops, or the sexual exploitation of minors.
Most of them come from local police departments and sheriff’s offices, although many come from the FBI and from Immigration & Customs Enforcement (they do a lot of the Internet sexual exploitation cases, I don’t know why). A handful come from other random federal agencies that I never even imagined dealing with, like the Forest Service.
In that role, I have implemented surveillance orders. They are expensive and time consuming, and they involve deploying computer hardware that isn’t normally part of our network.
Fortunately, I haven’t had to implement them often; usually the requests are just for identification of the owner of an email address or phone number, or identification of who was logged into a particular IP address at a given point in time.
I have never implemented a surveillance order without first reviewing the court order instructing us to do so. On the corporate side, it isn’t very hard to figure out whether or not this kind of paperwork is at least facially valid.
Now, I don’t doubt that it is a pain in the ass to do all the paperwork necessary to get a surveillance order. I’m even willing to imagine that it might be more of a pain than usual to get one from the secret FISA court.
In my opinion, that’s why we have the Constitution of the United States of America, especially the Fourth Amendment. It should be difficult for our government to spy on us.
But remember — surveillance isn’t necessarily about an imminent threat. Who sent this threatening email, or who posted a threat from this IP address, those are questions that could be answered with an administrative subpoena — much less paperwork intensive.
Surveillance is “we think this is a bad person planning something bad.” Why? If you think so, explain why to a court, and get them to issue a surveillance order.
Apparently it isn’t very hard, at least with the FISA court. According to Wired magazine (in a very poorly worded article):
Through the end of 2004, the court approved 18,761 warrants, and rejected only five. It approved 2,072, in 2005, and 2,181 in 2006, rejecting none. Five were withdrawn before a ruling.
PBS says that they’ve never rejected an application.
Anyway, I’m going to quit ranting about this. But if you’re also annoyed, contact your Senator or House member and tell them to support the House version of the bill.
Here’s how to find them if you don’t know who they are. And here’s a less ranting, shorter explanation of the issue.
Follow me on Twitter 