Christian Democrats in the United States

Saturday, September 20, 2008 10:50 PM

EFF lawsuit a straw man - tech proposal for privacy

The government has moved to dismiss the case brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and it will probably win, because the lawsuit is a "straw man," that is, a fake counter-argument set up to be easily knocked down.

The EFF lawsuit attacks the technology used to make the wiretaps, and not specific instances of the use of that technology without a court order. If NSA did not have some kind of access to facilities like this, they would not be able to do legitimate authorized searches at all.

Background: AT&T built rooms inside AT&T facilities which contain secured database replicas of telephone calls and Internet connections, a mirror of live traffic run through a fiber splitter to sift through content of calls and Internet traffic, and an archival system for at least some of that content. Then they provided the National Security Agency with a private network connection into these rooms. EFF alleges that this in and of itself constitutes a violation of first and fourth amendment protections of free speech, free association and freedom from unreasonable searches without court orders.

This is, on its face, false. If AT&T had not constructed these facilities, NSA would have no means to conduct database searches or wiretaps even when authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC). They cannot give NSA direct access to their live business databases, routers and networks, because these are busy doing their jobs, and searches on the live systems would reveal the NSA cyber presence even when authorized.

They cannot filter through the data streams for the people they're looking for, unless their equipment has full access to the entire data stream, because of the way modern communications technology works. Individual "connections" are now "virtual," that is, they are no longer individual wires being connected by switchboard operators or machines. So to find the one they want, their computer has to filter through all of them with some search parameter, i.e. your subscriber endpoint or telephone number.

Because the database replicas, traffic mirrors and content archives all belong to AT&T and are within the AT&T facility, there is no violation of your consent. Because, you consented that AT&T would have possession of your call records and content when you picked up the phone or used the Internet — otherwise you wouldn't be using it.

See the logical problem here? The lawsuit attacks the technology to do wiretaps, not specific instances of illegal wiretaps using that technology.

The straw man argument serves as an easy way for the government to throw out the case and put the media to rest without answering the deeper question, did the NSA access any data in the search archive without authorization from FISC? Plus, it divides public sentiment in an illogical way, making people hate and distrust each other — our recurring theme.

Such contradictions and illogical hysteria sound like propaganda to me... something to distract us from worse sins committed in the dark by monstrous people acting secretly with our community resources. So the EFF is highly suspect, in my opinion, as a possible front for the intelligence agencies themselves.

Instead of causing fear of technology and the government, we should simply and openly develop new technology to achieve a compromise between goals of privacy and the government's interest in legitimate criminal and espionage investigations.

Instead of going to the NSA, the private network out of the AT&T facilities should connect to a facility run by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The FISC facilities would control when NSA could connect to the search archives and wiretap filters at AT&T. By using dual-key cryptographic authentication, both FISC and NSA would have to be keyed in for NSA to connect. FISC personnel would not be able to connect independently, and could not read search or tap results, because the return data stream would be encrypted with NSA's keys. To start a wiretap, NSA would need to define specific rule sets that would be transmitted to FISC. In an emergency situation as prescribed by law, live FISC personnel would key up an emergency tap prior to approval by a FISC judge. The FISC facility would keep all records of these rule sets and access times in a secure way so they can only be decrypted by trusted personnel. To engage an existing wiretap authorization, NSA would key up the rule set, and the FISC computers would automatically authorize the connection cryptographically according to the parameters of the rules.

This would be the basic military concept of "two person integrity" at work institutionally as the separation of powers — checks and balances — that is supposed to make this country a stable success.

If we require (pay) AT&T and other major networks to implement the archival and tapping technology in this way, then the People can be sure that their privacy is protected under law, and the government can do its spying under the rules of statute, with legality enforced by the technology.

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