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Subject: Wiretap loophole concerns.
From: the tty of Geoffrey S. Goodfellow <Geoff @ SRI-CSL>
TAP 2takes (EXCLUSIVE: 10 p.m. EST Embargo) A
Loophole Raises Concern About Privacy in Computer Age By DAVID BURNHAM
c. N.Y. Times News Service
WASHINGTON - Telecommunications experts are expressing concern
that the federal wiretap law does not make it a crime for anyone,
whether private citizen, law enforcement officer or foreign spy, to
intercept the millions of messages transmitted around the United
States each day by computer.
The experts, who are in Congress, the American Telephone and
Telegraph Co., and the American Civil Liberties Union, say the
importance of the loophole in the 1968 law has been greatly magnified
in recent years with the increasing use of computers for storing and
transmitting personal, business, and government information.
Three congressional panels are considering whether the law should
be rewritten to reflect the computer age. A major concern, both in
Congress and among the experts, is whether the loophole gives local,
state, and federal law enforcement officers an opportunity to conduct
computerized electronic surveillance without the court approval
required for wiretaps.
There is no evidence of widespread exploitation of the law by
officers. But John Shattock, director of the national office of the
civil liberties union, said: "The issue here is the privacy of
communications against secret government surveillance. The threat here
truly is Big Brother, not a group of little kids."
Some fear that any change in the current law, unless it is done
carefully, could inadvertently increase or decrease the power of law
enforcement officers.
The wiretap law forbids the monitoring of conversations except for
law enforcement officers who have obtained a warrant from a judge. In
the age of the computer, however, more and more messages, including
those expressed by the human voice, are broken down into "digital
bits" in their transmission.
But because of the way the 1968 law is written, the interception
of these bits is not a crime and the police are free to intercept them
without warrants.
Most electronic surveillance is passive, making it impossible to
measure how much the loophole is being exploited, whether by the
authorities, by industrial spies, by organized crime figures trying to
make a killing in the stock market, by international spies seeking
government data, or by curious individuals with a personal computer.
But in recent months a number of computerized data banks in
government and industry have become the targets of long-distance
telephone attacks by amateur computer experts working from their home
computers. In addition, indictments have charged foreign computer
concerns with attempting to purchase sensitive details about the
products of American companies.
More seriously, p1years ago the Carter
administration announced that it believed the Soviet Union was using
antennas believed to have been set up on its grounds in Washington,
New York, and San Francisco to intercept digital information being
transmitted in microwaves by businesses and government agencies.
The Carter administration took limited technical steps to prevent
the Russians from obtaining sensitive government data and ordered the
National Security Agency to help private corporations improve their
security. But it never took any formal legal action against the
Russians or formally asked Congress to amend the law.
H.W. William Caming oversees privacy and corporate security
matters at AT&T. "As we enter the year made famous by George Orwell's
book, 'Nineteen-Eighty-four,' computer crime is on the rise and may
well constitute a major crime threat of the 1980s," he said in a
recent interview. "We therefore are encouraged by and vigorously
support current efforts in Congress and the states to enact suitable
legislation concerning computer crime. We believe that such
legislation should include provisions making it a crime to secretly
intercept non-voice communications."
AT&T is not the only company concerned about the wiretap law. In
response to an inquiry, Satellite Business Systems, a major new data
communications company jointly owned by International Business
Machines, the Aetna Life and Casualty Co., and Comsat, agreed that
some experts believed there was a "potential loophole" in current
law and that, to the extent this was so, "legislation to make clear
that such unauthorized interception is prohibited would be useful."
The 1968 wiretap law makes it a federal felony for a third party
to intercept the conversations of others by placing an electronic
listening device, or a "bug," in a telephone or other place such as
an office.
The only exception is that federal, state, and local law
enforcement officers may use wiretaps in the investigation of certain
crimes but only with the approval of the senior prosecutor of a
particular jurisdiction and a special warrant from a judge.
The law does not apply to computer tapping
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