p2pnet - rss feed: FCC wiretap order protest
p2p news / p2pnet: An alliance of university presidents is challenging a US federal ruling meant to force universities to re-engineer their networks by June 2007 to make surveillance easier, says the Daily Collegian.
An FCC (Federal Communications Commission) order extends the 1994 CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) to require telephone carriers to engineer switching systems at their own cost so federal agents can obtain easy surveillance access.
Universities, libraries, airports providing wireless service and commercial ISPs, as well as to municipalities that provide Internet access to residents, are affected.
The new alliance includes the University of Texas and the story has Daniel Updegrove, U of T vp for information technology, saying, “The cost depends partly on how many surveillance points the Justice Department would require.”
Having a single point to monitor traffic in and out of the university wouldn’t be too expensive, but complete coverage would be costly because equipment would have to be installed at every wiring cabinet that ethernet cables run through, which would create security concerns, Updegrove said.
"If you create a set of points, you hope that the only one who could listen is law enforcement members with valid credentials," the Daily Collegian quotes him as stating.
"But what if the bad guys are listening in too? We would certainly want some clear indication that these doors and windows aren’t being left [open] inadvertently and aren’t being abused."
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Also see:-
Daily Collegian - University presidents file suit against FCC on wiretap ruling, October 26, 2005
at their own cost - US online surveillance, October 24, 2005
October 29th, 2005 at 7:55 am
Some comments about this whole situation.
1. vpn. Ok they’ve got bigass computers (and dumbass idiots running them i’m sure) to try and crack the encryption, but by the time that’s happened it’d probly be too late to do anything about what they discover.
2. Oh yeah sure, the fbi is gonna make sure no nasty bad guys hack these connections open and do bad things to the uni’s networks. Just like they’ve got their wonderful new computer system working so well!
3. The bad guys probly don’t go to american universities. I’m sure they’re not that stupid, and if they are, they deserve to get caught.
4. The fbi just wants to be able to check out all the cool stuff the uni students are downloading on p2p networks.
I’m betting number 4 is the real reason for this whole exercise in futility.
So where’s the cia and the homeland security dept in all this? Why aren’t they demanding similar access? Will they also get full access? Or are they gonna wait til the fbi’s setup is done, then demand their own extra setups as well?