The entrepreneurial intercept community
Wired has a worth-reading article by Thomas Greene about a recent surveillance equipment trade show:
These devices [for mass electronic surveillance] are a bonanza for the communications hardware industry, vouchsafed by the U.S. Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act of 1994, or CALEA, which mandates that all new telephone company gear must be wiretap-friendly, or “CALEA compliant,” according to the popular euphemism. This has led to a seller's market with equipment makers pushing their dual-use kits with exceptional confidence. The sales pitch has evolved beyond the traditional points of reliability, scalability, total cost of ownership and ease of deployment to exploit the hard-sell undercurrents of mass-scale commerce that's mandated by law and funded by taxpayers who are powerless to review the deals and evaluate their various costs and benefits to society.
Greene keeps asking questions about how these pieces of hardware could be misused by abusive governments with inadequate legal regimes. A drunken reseller sets him straight:
“The NSA is using this stuff. The DEA, the Secret Service, the CIA. Are you kidding me? They don't answer to you. They do whatever the hell they want with it. Are you really that naive? Now leave these [hardware] guys alone; they make a product, that's all. It's nothing to them what happens afterward. You really need to educate yourself.
The extension of CALEA to online voice applications and broadband access providers is under review by the D.C. Circuit. But the legal answer may not matter much to the entrepreneurial intercept community.
After all, their hopes for business success are being bolstered by the Administration, which is said to be pressuring ISPs to hang onto data for years — and is always interested in surveillance. Surveillance, storage, mandatory gateways — it's a good time for trade shows aimed at aiding the war on terrorism.