Law enforcement increases crime

According to Robert X. Cringely's "Shooting Ourselves in the Foot: Grandiose Schemes for Electronic Eavesdropping May Hurt More Than They Help", a wide-spread electronic wiretapping system, designed to track a criminal's calls regardless of the phone number or communications system used, has actually led to innocent people getting wiretapped.

Israeli companies, spies, and gangsters have hacked CALEA for fun and profit, as have the Russians and probably others, too. They have used our own system of electronic wiretaps to wiretap US, because you see that's the problem: CALEA works for anyone who knows how to run it. Not all smart programmers are Americans or wear white hats. We should know that by now. CALEA has probably given up as much information as it has gathered. Part of this is attributable to poor design and execution, part to pure laziness, part to the impossibility of keeping such a complex yet accessible system totally secure, and part because hey, they're cops, they're good guys. Give 'em a break. Have a donut.

This vulnerability is never discussed in public because it is an embarrassment to law enforcement and because the agencies that pay for CALEA don't want its vulnerability to be known. That might compromise national security. Alas, national security is already compromised by the system itself, and the people who might take advantage of the vulnerability have known about it for years. Only we are kept in the dark.

Scary.


Written by Andrew Ittner in misc on Fri 11 July 2003. Tags: commentary, government, technology