FCC chairman suggests expanded wiretap laws in response to the Paris attacks
By Brian Fung and Andrea Peterson, Washington Post
The nation’s top telecom regulator recommended broadening America’s wiretapping laws Tuesday, in response to the recent attacks in Paris by the Islamic State that left more than 120 people dead.
While the Federal Communications Commission cannot take direct actionagainst the Islamic State, such as shutting down its Web sites or social media accounts, Congress could do “specific things” allowing the FCC to assist law enforcement more effectively, agency Chairman Tom Wheeler told a House subcommittee.
That includes revisiting the wiretap legislation, said Wheeler. The 1994 law, known as the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, provides for the “lawful intercept” of a suspect’s telephone and online communications. It requires telecom companies and Internet providers, not to mention some online voice services, to build their networks in ways that grant authorities easier access to those communications.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Ben Franklin
This desired expansion of surveillance is as much about the government’s ability to tax alt currencies and the black/gray markets as it is about security. The fact that the Feds put away a web designer for life without parole ought to scare people to death. But no. Nobody cares about that.
No I do think a number of people deeply care about it, but in a climate of fear, people also start to fear the consequences of speaking out against the flow. (we certainly saw that in the lead-up to the second war with Iraq in which objectors were labelled traitors)
It’s certainly a tough stance. It takes a lot of courage to put one’s philosophy of liberty (which so much of always seems theoretical)ahead of fear of some more immediate bad consequence.
Fortunately, we do more or less remain a nation of laws rather than one lead by the whims of the latest polling data. It’s in times like these that those that call themselves constitutionalists need to speak and act like it.
Ironically, they are often the ones calling for measures that push against the liberties we almost always take for granted every time some public event pushes the body politic towards a desire for control. I think the outcry is muted because many young people have no sense of privacy or understand how the way they communicate has by default abandoned any real sense of it. This ain’t you fathers college generation. That is a problem – as is the fact that scholars and judges have radically differed on the degree to which we enjoy rights to privacy under the constitution. And of course the framers in their wildest dreams could never have imagined digital surveillance.