Can the FBI really wiretap email without a warrant?

In a local news article ( http://www.kcrg.com/article.aspx?art_id=98311&cat_id=123 ), it sounds like it's a done deal that the FBI will monitor all email at the University of Iowa:

The FCC recently expanded a ruling that allows the FBI to wiretap phones.

Now it includes e-mails and instant messaging.

The FBI needs a warrant to search your e-mail.

They go to your internet provider and get what they need.

[snip]

At the University of Iowa, when you click send your e-mail travels through cords to a room filled with servers.

The FBI wants to stop e-mails when they get to the server room before they hit the internet.
UI Chief Information Officer said, "The law enforcement agency would like to capture the traffic that comes over the wire and then automatically route it to their facility so they can do the monitoring."

[snip]

But the feds have legally tapped phones for a decade.

This is just an expansion of the law and it is a costly one for UI.

[end article quotes]

But how can this be allowed?  Forget the costliness - what about privacy?  Sure, the FBI's been tapping phones for years, but does it tap EVERY phone?  Surely not.  Yet if this system is put in place, it will be the equivalent of tapping every single phone 24/7.

I don't know enough about this issue, but the article makes it sound as though the University of Iowa is going along with the plan, which I find appalling.  If centers of learning don't put up a fight, then Big Brother has really arrived.

•  well, i haven't read the whole story but

  The technology has been around for years for the FBI to do this.  If I remember correctly, all email passes through their filter, and then it "reads" those which are applicable to the warrent, since all emails usually have to ultimately pass through one pipe, and there is no good way to "wiretap" emails in any traditional sense of the word.

  by FleetAdmiralJ on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 10:17:15 AM PDT

  •  Oops, my fault for inaccurate phrasing

    I know they can do it - my concern is, Do they now have the legal RIGHT to do it?

    That's what is alarming.

    by Montague on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 10:22:57 AM PDT

    •  Technically, yes

      since they are, theoretically, only actually looking at the email which the warrent is applied to.  The program is supposed to filter out everything else with, again theoretically, no record of who sent the email, who it was going to, and what was in it.

      by FleetAdmiralJ on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 10:25:07 AM PDT

      •  While this isn't a perfect analogy

        think of it as a cop looking around at everyone's license plates in an attempt to find one they are looking for, or monitoring everyone's speeds in order to find a speeder.

        now, there are definitely major flaws in these analogies, but they at least get halfway there.

        by FleetAdmiralJ on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 10:28:24 AM PDT

        •  Two things

          The cop isn't going to be able to "store" the data of every passing car in his/her head for future use and and the cop doesn't have a perfect "search machine" in his/her head.

          I know you said the analogy isn't perfect.  My point is simply that the potential for abuse is humongous with this system.  Far worse than having cops watch me drive by.

          by Montague on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 10:32:37 AM PDT

          •  Well yeah, that is a conern

            Does the system, as it is supposed to work store any emails that aren't applicable to a warrent? No, unless they've changed it from the last time I knew something.

            Can it be used to store all that email.  Well, yes.  Then again, you could say that they could just tap every phone too, so there is always risk in monitoring devices, no matter what they are.

            However, since the proper use of it doesn't keep it, thats why its legal.

            by FleetAdmiralJ on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 10:37:03 AM PDT

  •  For more information....

    Carnivore (FBI)

    I presume this is what the FBI would use.

    by FleetAdmiralJ on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 10:23:51 AM PDT

•  Echalon

  
  This goes back to a few years ago--

  there are a list of 500 or so key words Echalon (sp?) supposedly looks for in e-mail- I seem to recall some alternative rock group actually had a song called "eschalon" where they sing all 500 words as the lyrics.  Anyway...

  Try this story:
  http://news.com.com/2100-1001-270655.html

  by jgkojak on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 10:28:11 AM PDT

  •  Eschelon..

    
    ...is the correct spelling, and regardless of how many keywords are on the search list actively at any given time, the list can be expanded far beyond 500 words.  

    by G2geek on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 11:34:23 AM PDT

•  my understanding

  is that large public universities basically have to go along with what the gov't wants, lest they lose all their research funding.

  by Politburo on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 10:32:20 AM PDT

  •  And to some extent

    UI already does that.

    But this is going way too far, IMO.  It's not the university's fault, of course, that the FBI is allowed to do this.

    by Montague on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 10:34:05 AM PDT

•  email == postcard

  Unencrypted emails are just like postcards. It is not too hard for anyone who wants to read emails passing around the internets.

  Does the FBI need a warrant to read postcards sitting around the post office?

  I used to use telnet and ftp to connect to remote machines. Now I use ssh and scp. Maybe it is time encrypted emails became the standard.

  by Dr Benway on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 10:49:44 AM PDT

  •  To upload?

    I do upload to websites regularly.  But what's the diff with ssh and scp?  Are those secure FTP programs?

    by Montague on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 11:28:51 AM PDT

    •  asdf

      ssh: interactive connection. For us Linux/unix geeks, secure access to the command line. Replaces telnet.  

      scp: For secure copying of files across the internet. Replaces ftp.

      by Dr Benway on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 12:47:47 PM PDT

      •  Thanks

        I'll look into it.

        by Montague on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 01:03:45 PM PDT

•  They can do whatever they want

  They're the government and Bush is in power.  However, practicality would mandate that they hire like a thousand new people just to keep up with all the email traffic from one university, let alone all emails and instant messages in general.  Consider that they tap the cell phones of people all over the world, but it takes months for them to actually have someone review the transcripts.

  I don't care anymore.  It's bunker time.

  by Magnus Greel on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 11:18:29 AM PDT

  •  Yea and nay

    If you tap phones, someone must take the time to listen.  Even if a machine listens (identifying key words like "bomb"), it has to listen in real time or close to it.

    Email can be searched and scanned for words in seconds.  The ability to do great harm seems exponentially higher to me.

    by Montague on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 11:27:29 AM PDT

    •  True, but

      doesn't there have to be someone for the computer to give its information to?  It's an interesting situation.

      Here's a thought: how about tomorrow, everyone writes emails with the words "bomb" "Osama" "Abu Ghraib" and "Crawford Ranch" in them.

      by Magnus Greel on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 12:18:10 PM PDT

      •  My point is

        the person would get a list from the computer.  If it looked for "bomb" it would produce a list of emails with that word.  Or "bomb" + "new york city" + some Arabic language, giving a smaller list.

        Later on they could search for "bush sucks" and go hound the writer of that email.  Etc. and do whatever they want.  In fact if it's on file, and someone in the administration wants to see so-and-so's email, they could do that, too.  It might not be legal, but it might be easy.

        by Montague on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 12:29:03 PM PDT

•  how it's done....

  What we're talking about here is domestic SIGINT (signals intelligence).  Here are some things you should know:

  Collection (acquiring the information) is the easy part.  Machine processing (e.g. keyword recognition, both spoken and written; voiceprint recognition; email sender & receiver ID matching) comes next and deliberately has it's false-positive ratio set slightly on the high side.  

  Then comes post-processing which is where humans get into the picture.  NSA's foreign intel activities require a very large number of humans to listen to snippets of conversations and read snippets of email, and judge them "go / no-go" quickly.  The stuff that gets "go" proceeds to the next step where someone listens to or reads more of it up to & including the entire thing.  From there, anything that gets a further "go" proceeds to analysis.  Analysis is where they expand the scope as needed to get full context (i.e. bring in other intercepts with similar header information or call detail information) and develop the original intercept into a piece of usable intel.  

  The steps that require human intervention (preceding paragraph) are enormously labor intensive, not even NSA can keep up with the flood.  FBI has fewer resources than NSA.  FBI isn't allowed to ask NSA to pick up part of their (FBI's) workload except in extraordinary circumstances (e.g. terrorist attack immanent or in progress).  So FBI has a huge backlog to deal with, and has to compensate for the high false-positives on the machine side by using a deliberate low false-positive threshold on the human side.

  The amount of traffic that can be collected by machine intercept is absolutely enormous.  But that is not the point.  The amount of traffic that can be processed by live humans is a tiny trickle of what can in theory be collected.  And the storage capacity that would be required to store all of what's collected to enable the humans to catch up, is beyond even NSA's budget.  

  By analogy, the reason that dial phones became universal was that the Bell System realized that there were not enough people in the workforce who could be hired as operators to put through calls on manual switchboards.  That was over 60 years ago.  Compare the volume of communications today, to 60 years ago.

  Bottom line here is, there is relatively little to worry about in terms of civil liberties issues in a practical sense.  However it's always a good idea to keep track of these issues in the event there is ever an abuse or misuse of the capabilities.  

  And of course, encrypt, encrypt, encrypt, the longer the key-length the better.  

  by G2geek on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 11:54:40 AM PDT

  •  Interesting detail

    Thanks.  Of couse once all that data is available, if someone in power wanted to read all the email from someone they don't like, theoretically it's possible, right?  Even if it's not legal.

    by Montague on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 12:30:41 PM PDT

•  right after 9/11

  a colleague used to write a sporadic email newsletter to friends of his activities, interests and thoughts - this was before blogs.  much of it was political, policy and foriegn relations.  anyway, the summer before 9/11 he wrote a short piece in one newsletter about terrorism that proved prescient in several respects (not just that an attack happened).

  a few weeks after 9/11 two FBI agents showed up at his house to discuss his "ties" with terrorism and wanted to know how he "knew."  i believe he patiently responded that anyone with half a brain could have made the conclusions he did.

  but the scarier part was how in the hell did the FBI get ahold of that email.  it certainly wasn't from a recipient since the content was in no way suspicious or even inflammatory.  it was more like "this could happen if we don't act now."  

  by corndog on Wed Oct 26, 2005 at 11:59:39 AM PDT