Feds to Telecoms: Stop Upgrading on the way to Wiretap More Easily [Wiretapping]

Current law mandates that telecoms allow the govt. to listen in on you when deemed necessary. But with blazing advances in what telecoms offer, the govt is left behind. They wish to catch up. Their solution? Tougher law.

A governmental task force made up officials from the Justice and Commerce Departments, FBI, and intelligence community all say it’s time to make stronger the original 1994 law that mandated fed-friendly backdoors for every telecom. And now that the govt wants even greater access, a decade-and-a-half old law isn’t quite cutting it for them anymore. The difficulty? Telecoms are offering increasingly more sophisticated services (good for us!), which suggests service interruptions and impaired spying capabilities (bad for the govt, and maybe good for terrorists looking on your view of things!) Telecom companies are already pissed-a more powerful wiretap law would slow down things on their end, they say: ” The govt. ‘s answer is ‘don’t deploy the brand new services – wait until the govt. catches up. But that’s not how it works. Too many services develop too quickly, and there are just too many players in this now,” explained a frustrated telecom lawyer.

But this goes beyond telecom woes. In line with the Times, current service outages have prevented the execution of perfectly legal, court ordered wiretappings. This goes beyond terror hype-the lack to tap a phone makes it harder to bust domestic criminals ranging from drug dealers to white collar fraudsters. But the govt. is straddling a tough line here- soliciting for vast new powers to take heed to us in private should come with guarantees that this power won’t be misused; an assurance that’s lacking. If the White House wants to crack into our GMail and keep telecoms from upgrading, it’s going to be a troublesome sell. [ NY Times ]

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This post is tagged: commerce departments, current service, intelligence community, service interruptions, service outages, sophisticated services, telecom companies