A Times Editorial

Eavesdropping project

Snooping is being made easier by law enforcement without much thought to our right to privacy.

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 30, 2000

Only days after some of the highest profile sites on the Web were invaded by hackers earlier this year, U.S. Rep. Bill McCollum, R-Longwood, announced his intention to hold hearings into whether "law enforcement has the tools necessary to investigate ... cybercriminals." McCollum rarely passes up an opportunity to try to funnel more power and money to our intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

But McCollum needn't worry about the FBI's arsenal as long as President Clinton is in office. The Clinton administration appears thoroughly committed to expanding the FBI's snooping abilities without the slightest concern about the risks to our liberties.

In 1994, Clinton signed the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), a law that requires telephone companies to rewire their networks in compliance with FBI technical requirements to give federal and state law enforcement the ability to wiretap. Questions about how much surveillance capability CALEA authorizes and how much the phone companies are to provide are part of a lawsuit currently before a federal appellate court in a case that is likely to establish the future standards for privacy in much of the telecommunications industry, including the Internet. Yet even before these questions have been answered, the president has proposed in his fiscal 2001 budget that $240-million be given to the telephone companies for rewiring. That figure is up from $15-million this year.

Nearly a quarter-billion dollars may sound like a lot, but according to experts, it's only a down payment on the huge cost of transforming today's telecommunications industry into a giant peephole for the FBI.

In passing CALEA, Congress intended to give law enforcement the same wiretapping access it had before new technologies made such surveillance impossible. However, the FBI, without objection from the White House, has taken CALEA as a green light to demand that phone companies give it far more information, including the physical locations of cell phone users, than it had under traditional wiretapping laws.

Now the president is asking Congress to start funding this expansive eavesdropping project -- a request that fits a pattern he established early in his presidency. From its failed attempt to control the use of encryption to its support of huge new federal information databases, the Clinton administration has not allowed citizen privacy to get in the way of expanding the reach of law enforcement authorities. According to a recent report by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, since Clinton has been president, federal wiretapping has increased 33 percent.

While cyber-attacks against Yahoo and Amazon.com are dramatic examples of the mischief cybercriminals can do, they do not justify shortchanging civil liberties by giving the FBI sweeping new wiretapping authority. President Clinton, of all people, should be particularly sensitive to the privacy of telephone conversations.

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