14 DAY TRIAL // Governmental surveillance in the online realm, in real time, is about to become a fact, by 2014.
According to Andrew Weissmann, general counsel for the FBI, monitoring cloud services and online chat providers is “top priority” for the Bureau, one that needs to be addressed by the end of the year.
“The advent of cybercrime is here to stay. It is now possible to commit crimes in seconds that really would have taken years to plan in this physical, 3D world,” FBI’s general counsel says.
At the moment, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) from 1994 compels phone companies and Internet Service Providers (ISP) to include surveillance capabilities in their infrastructure.
However, technology has made available new means of communication not covered by CALEA, which make “the ability to intercept communications with a court order increasingly obsolete.”
The FBI needs to – and is looking to – get with the times.
“We don’t have the ability to go to court and say we need a court order that actually requires the recipient to effectuate the intercept,” Weissmann says.
“You think that you’re getting an order that says, ‘Recipient, you have to actually effectuate the communication.’ Well that’s not what you get. You get something that says that you have to provide technical assistance,” he adds.
This is about real-time traffic that is not transparent to the ISP because it flows encrypted between the sender and receiver with only a server in between to intermediate the exchange, which includes services like those from Google (email, voice, chat), Skype or Dropbox.
Basically, the FBI wants the same power to intercept communication over the Internet as it has with phone calls, and the companies that run this type of services to do it for them.