Distressing news today — both for technologists and civil libertarians — as a federal appeals court ruled that the FBI and telecom regulators could demand that Internet services be designed to facilitate government wiretapping.

In 2005, CDT joined a coalition of public interest advocates, universities and Internet companies in asking the court to overturn an August 2005 decision by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to extend the 1994 Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) to the Internet. The FCC made its decision to extend the reach of CALEA despite the fact that law expressly exempts “information services. ”

CDT has repeatedly argued that Congress intended to exclude the Internet from the wiretap design mandates, because the Internet is fundamentally different from the telephone network. The FCC wanted a certain result from the get-go, and they twisted or ignored the words of the statute to get it. This decision threatens the privacy rights of innocent Americans as well as the ability of technology companies to innovate freely.

A nice timeline of the CALEA fight is available here.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 9th, 2006 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Security & Freedom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.