As the current ECPA stands, law enforcement has the ability to obtain emails without a warrant. There are some laws currently making their way through Congress to change this, but law enforcement agencies obviously like things as they are. In fact, one agency in particular thinks it needs even more power to spy on your private communications.
Slate reports that FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann revealed during a talk at the American Bar Association last week that his agency is pushing for the ability to spy on communications in real time. In other words, the FBI wants to install the Internet equivalent of wiretaps on all major email and online chat services, including in-game chats on Facebook, etc, to monitor communications in real time.
Why does the FBI need this new power when it can already obtain emails without a warrant? It’s all about a 1994 surveillance law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. The law in its current state allows the FBI and other government agencies to install monitoring equipment on networks run by ISPs and phone companies, but it doesn’t cover the services that use those networks.
The Internet was a very different place in 1994, and many services that we now use, including Skype, Gmail and Facebook, were not around. The CALEA only covered broad communications made over a network instead of encrypted communications now being sent over these services. The FBI wants access to these because it just knows that they are being used for “criminal conversations.”
Despite the potential for abuse and overly broad powers, the FBI has made “reforming” the CALEA a priority for 2013. Weissmann says that they’re working with the intelligence community to craft a bill that would give it the ability to monitor all communications in real time.
The only silver lining of hope in all of this is that Weissmann acknowledges that there “should be a public debate” around granting the FBI new spy powers. It’s a nice gesture, but other privacy debates in Washington have shown that law enforcement and some lawmakers don’t really care about the public’s opinion.