With its attempts at modernizing the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, the FBI intends on having unrestricted access to your internet communications.
At a talk for the American Bar Association in Washington, D.C., FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann said that the 1994 law designed to aid law enforcement conduct surveillance is not keeping up with modern times and needs to be amended. Modernizing surveillance law is reported to be the FBI's 'top priority' in 2013.
Specifically, Weissman states that the law only applies to telecommunications companies, and not web-based ones. He contends that criminals are now circumventing these laws by flocking en masse to the internet and 'going dark.'
"We're making the ability to intercept communications with a court order increasingly obsolete," he said. "Those communications are being used for criminal conversations."
He continues: He added: "This huge legal apparatus...to prevent crimes, prevent terrorist acts is becoming increasingly hampered and increasingly marginalized the more we have technology that is not covered by CALEA, because we don't have the ability to just go to the court and say 'You know what, they just have to do it.'"
Weissmann says that the FBI hopes to soon have the power to monitor communications ranging from Gmail, to Dropbox, all the way to the chat feature in online games such as Scrabble. Basically, the FBI wants to monitor, in real time, any and all forms of communication on the web.
Currently, the CALEA is capable of compelling internet and telephone providers to cooperate with the FBI by offering 'technical assistance' druing an ongoing investigation, but that is a far cry from actually handing over the reigns and letting the agency do as it sees fit.
"It's a very hard thing to talk about publicly," Weissmann said, though acknowledged that "it's something that there should be a public debate about."
Already there has been quite a bit of public backlash over both the Patriot Act and the Wiretap Act. This latest proposition is sure to only further incite privacy protection activists who are already incensed at the intrusion of the government into our personal lives.
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