Date: Mon, 9 Mar 92 01:32:06 EST
From: Cy Burway <
[email protected]>
Subject: File 4--F.B.I. and Digital Communications Amendment (NYT synopsis)
As Technology Makes Wiretaps More Difficult, F.B.I. Seeks Help
(From: New York Times, March 8, 1992: p. I-12)
By Anthony Ramirez
The Department of Justice says that advanced telephone equipment in
wide use around the nation is making it difficult for law-enforcement
agencies to wiretap the phone calls of suspected criminals.
The Government proposed legislation Friday requiring the nation's
telephone companies to give law-enforcement agencies technical help
with their eavesdropping. Privacy advocates criticized the proposal as
unclear and open to abuse.
In the past, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies
could simply attach alligator clips and a wiretap device to the line
hanging from a telephone pole. Law-enforcement agents could clearly
hear the conversations. That is still true of telephone lines carrying
analog transmissions, the electronic signals used by the first
telephones in which sounds correspond proportionally to voltage.
But such telephone lines are being steadily replaced by high-speed,
high-capacity lines using digital signals. On a digital line, F.B.I.
agents would hear only computer code or perhaps nothing at all because
some digital transmissions are over fiber-optic lines that convert the
signals to pulses of light.
In addition, court-authorized wiretaps are narrowly written. They
restrict the surveillance to particular parties and particular topics
of conversation over a limited time on a specific telephone or group
of telephones. That was relatively easy with analog signals. The
F.B.I. either intercepted the call or had the phone company re-route
it to an F.B.I. location, said William A. Bayse, the assistant
director in the technical services division of the F.B.I.
But tapping a high-capacity line could allow access to thousands of
conversations. Finding the conversation of suspected criminals, for
example, in a complex "bit stream" would be impossible without the aid
of phone company technicians.
There are at least 140 million telephone lines in the country and more
than half are served in some way by digital equipment, according to
the United States Telephone Association, a trade group. The major
arteries and blood vessels of the telecommunications network are
already digital. And the greatest part of the system, the capillaries
of the network linking central telephone offices to residences and
businesses, will be digital by the mid-1990s.
Thousand Wiretaps
The F.B.I. said there were 1,083 court-authorized wiretaps--both new
and continuing--by Federal, state, and local law-enforcement
authorities in 1990, the latest year for which data are available.
Janlori Goldman, director of the privacy and technology project for the
American Civil Liberties Union, said she had been studying the
development of the F.B.I. proposal for several months.
"We are not saying that this is not a problem that shouldn't be
fixed," she said, "but we are concerned that the proposal may be
overbroad and runs the risk that more information than is legally
authorized will flow to the F.B.I.
In a news conference in Washington on Friday, the F.B.I. said it was
seeking only to "preserve the status quo" with its proposal so that
it could maintain the surveillance power authorized by a 1968 Federal
law, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. The proposal,
which is lacking in many details is also designed to benefit state and
local authorities.
Under the proposed law, the Federal Communications Commission would
issue regulations to telephone companies like the GTE Corporation and
the regional Bell telephone companies, requiring the "modification" of
phone systems "if those systems impede the Government's ability to
conduct lawful electronic surveillance."
In particular, the proposal mentions "providers of electronic
communications services and private branch exchange operators,"
potentially meaning all residences and all businesses with telephone
equipment.
Frocene Adams, a security official with US West in Denver is the
chairman of Telecommunications Security Association, which served as
the liaison between the industry and the F.B.I. "We don't know the
extent of the changes required under the proposal," she said, but
emphasized that no telephone company would do the actual wiretapping
or other surveillance.
Computer software and some hardware might have to be changed, Ms. Adams
aid, but this could apply to new equipment and mean relatively few
changes for old equipment.
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