FBI Snooping Software Unveiled

FOIA documents shed light on long history of government spying

August 30, 2007

A FOIA request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation has revealed documents related to the FBI's wiretapping and surveillance system known as DCSNet. As wired.com reported yesterday, the system is capable of intercepting calls from land lines, cell phones, push-to-talk systems and SMS messages in real time, send digital recordings to translators and even track targets using cell-tower information and stream their intercepts to mobile surveillance units. This system allows the FBI to link directly to central hubs operated by the communications carriers, which are networked to all the individual switches operated by the carrier.

This 1984-on-steroids snoop software immediately brings to mind the Bush administration's illegal wiretap program, which broke in the New York Times in 2005. Recently, the White House was able to push a retroactive approval of the illegal program through Congress. And White House apologist and National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell recently made headlines for asserting that Americans are going to die for questioning the program.

As the wired.com article makes clear, however, the program was born on Clinton's watch, with the passage of the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), in 1994. According to Wired, "CALEA requires telecommunications companies to install only telephone-switching equipment that meets detailed wiretapping standards. Prior to CALEA, the FBI would get a court order for a wiretap and present it to a phone company, which would then create a physical tap of the phone system." Now federal regulators are forcing internet service providers and voice-over-internet companies to retrofit their networks for government surveillance, although U.S. intelligence snooping on the internet will come as no surprise to regular readers of The Corbett Report.

Indeed, these programs have little or nothing to do with partisan politics. As a recent episode of The Corbett Report makes clear, this has nothing to do with a false left/right paradigm and everything to do with a system in which big business makes a buck in the service of would-be government tyrants. Democrats and Republicans are lining up to support the police state control grid surveillance society which just a generation or two ago was the very stuff of sci-fi nightmares.

It is the nature of power, however, that once entrenched it is difficult to remove. The surveillance powers of the government over its own citizens is unlikely to be pried from intelligence agencies' hands anytime soon. Indeed, in the light of recent pronouncements from the White House, Mr. McConnell's statement might be seen as a threat rather than a warning.