Senior Navy officers in the Tail-Hook scandal were promoted, although civil suits granted huge awards from less responsible parties to the victims. Dozens of police were scolded, penalized or prosecuted for abusing their powers and positions. Phone companies and high-tech investigators complained of increasing intrusions and losses due to phone phreaks and computer crackers.
Nonetheless, Congress passed HR 4922, entitled "Interception of Digital and Other Communications," requiring that the nation's public telecommunications systems be made "wiretap ready." The mandatory system will permit undetectable remote monitoring of almost all of the nation's voice and data communications - including yours - from any adequately equipped site anywhere in the nation, under keystroke control of anyone who can gain access and is willing to use it.
BILLIONS OF DOLLARS FOR HUNDREDS OF WIRETAPS?
Although the only justification given for installing this massive Orwellian surveillance system was law enforcement's need for several hundred wiretaps nationwide, the bill authorized half a billion dollars to begin paying for its implementation. Business telephone subscribers - including local and state agencies - will pay its remaining costs, variously estimated at $3 to $6 billion dollars or more.
INADEQUATE OVERSIGHT
Incumbent federal, state and local Executive branch staff and officials will use the system, "pursuant to a court order or other authorization" - including all classified and military authorizations that remain hidden from the public. And the Executive branch has the unilateral responsibility to oversee itself, although there were numerous suggestions to Congress that usage reports and oversight responsibility for this draconian system be given to the legislative and/or judicial branches.
IT COULD HAVE CHANGED HISTORY
Richard Nixon, Attorney General John Mitchell, CIA spy Alderidge Ames, the IRS' 1,300-plus staffers and rogue law enforcement officials could have used it. J. Edgar Hoover could have controlled politicians and movies even better than he did using his "old fashioned" FBI resources. Like them and many others, unprincipled politicians and bureaucrats will surely be tempted to use it for personal or political gain. And teenagers and industrial and political spies must eagerly await its predictably imperfect implementation.
WILL IT BE ABUSED?
Consider Watergate. Lyndon Johnson's use of the IRS against political opponents. Hoover's FBI dossiers on everyone from Bing Crosby, to more than 600 pages just on Elvis Presley - part of the tens of thousands of pages of laboriously-compiled files remaining after FBI agents destroyed 35 file cabinets of suddenly unneeded dossiers, immediately upon their director's death. (In that era, all FBI movies were pro-FBI movies). We know much less of the FBI's covert dossiers on presidents, attorneys general, members of Congress, state and local political leaders and members of an amazingly docile press.
Unquestionably, law enforcement needs to be able to continue authorized wiretaps, even as telecom systems become digital. But a lineman's hand telephone, capable of evesdropping on ISDN digital conversations, costs only a few hundred dollars.
STATES CAN RESTORE BALANCE
At little or no additional cost to anyone, state legislatures and state PUCs can do much to protect against another Nixon or Hoover or Ames or staffer abusing this awesome power:
1. Mandate that all common carriers operating under their jurisdiction include in the system's implementation automated recording and reporting of all uses - just as they now record and report details of long distance phone calls.
2. Subject to court-ordered limited-time restraining orders, mandate that the reports be forwarded monthly to, say, appellate courts of the districts containing each calling number and called number, and to the state legislature's judiciary committees, and mandate that those legislative and judicial branches verify authorizations for all such executive-branch wiretaps.
3. And finally, mandate that the communications carrier send copies of all such surveillance records to the calling and called rate-payers within one year of their conclusion, or such limited, longer period as may be specified by court order.
Thus, surveillance technology can be used to monitor its own use - and report the results to the citizens, as is appropriate in a free society.
Send this to your PUC commissioners and your state legislators - soon! - so it can easily be included in the newly-mandated system. Online copies of the full text of HR 4922 are available at ftp.eff.org as /pub/X; at gopher.eff.org as 1/X; and by WWW or Mosaic as http.eff.org/pub/X, where "X" is "EFF/Policy/Digital_Telephony/digtel94.bill."
Jim Warren received the James Madison Freedom of Information award, the Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award and the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in its first year. He founded the Computers, Freedom & Privacy conferences and InfoWorld magazine. Warren lives near Woodside, Calif. e-mail/jwarren@well.com.
