SurveillanceU.S. considering revamping wiretap laws

The White House is reviewing an FBI plan to overhaul surveillance laws in order to make it easier for law enforcement officials to wiretap citizens using the Internet to communicate rather than phone services.

The New York Times reports that FBI director Robert Mueller said that under current rules, law enforcement agencies’ ability to eavesdrop on suspects is “going dark” due to advances in technology and new forms of communication. For the last three years Mueller has also been promoting a regulation which would require companies such as Facebook and Google to build into their instant-messaging services the capability to comply with wiretapping orders.

“I think the FBI’s proposal would render Internet communications less secure and more vulnerable to hackers and identity thieves,” Gregory Nojeim of the Center for Democracy and Technology told theTimes. “It would also mean that innovators who want to avoid new and expensive mandates will take their innovations abroad and develop them there, where there aren’t the same mandates.”

Currently Internet companies may comply if law enforcement wants to conduct surveillance on a suspect, but they are not obligated to, and in many cases do not. Phone companies such as Verizon and AT&T are currently subjected to the 1994 wiretapping capacity law.

Andrew Weissmann, the general counsel of the F.B.I., said in a statement that the change would only preserve the law enforcement’s ability to track suspected criminals.

“This doesn’t create any new legal surveillance authority,” Weissmann told the Times. “This always requires a court order. None of the ‘going dark’ solutions would do anything except update the law given means of modern communications.”

According to officials, companies not complying with law enforcement would be subject to stiff fines, which could be as high as $25,000 per day.

Internet companies would be notified by a receipt of a wiretap order or a warning from the attorney general that it might receive a surveillance request. Officials also said that small start-up companies would most likely not be asked to track criminals.

Foreign based companies that serve the United States would be subject to the same laws and required to have a point of contact in the United States to serve with a wiretap order.

Michael Sussmann, who worked for the Justice Department and currently advises communications providers, said that part of the proposal could be modeled after the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act of 2000, a British law.