Live from the Nuke Free Zone

According to a new federal law, you will be required to tear down the house you are currently living in and rebuild with glass walls, the better to allow federal agents to examine your activities should you ever be under suspicion of a crime. Don’t worry, you’re not… yet. And you don’t expect to be, do you? So you don’t have anything to hide. Go ahead. What? No, we won’t pay for you to rebuild your house. Don’t go looking for handouts just to comply with the law.

Okay, that one’s not really on the books. But the information-technology equivalent is:

The Federal Communications Commission, at the request of the FBI, has issued a ruling that any Internet service provider — this is not only a commercial ISP but universities and, tellingly, cities that provide free wi-fi access, among many other sites — must install equipment that will allow the FBI to remotely monitor communications that flow across that ISP’s access points.

Colleges are in the forefront of protesting this law, not for the civil liberties issues but for the monumental cost: colleges provide numerous access points, and each one will have to be retrofitted. The American Council on Education estimates the total cost of initial compliance at $7 billion, with an average tuition increase of about $450 to pay for ongoing costs associated with the equipment.

So just how pressing is this $7 billion need? Not very. In 2003, state and federal government agencies were granted 1,442 wiretap permits, and 12 of these were for computer communications, according to the Center for Democracy and Technology. The FBI is not apparently complaining about having any difficulty executing these wiretaps, with which a service provider can comply by installing the monitoring equipment where necessary.

(Oddly enough, this isn’t a civil liberties rant. It could be — but if you’re going to go there the response is “Well, they need a court order,” and then you have to go back into the weaknesses of the court order system, especially post-PATRIOT.)

I’m suspicious enough of the motivations of the Justice Department under this administration to notice that the request was made by the FBI sometime “last year”; it was in July of 2004 that Philadelphia announced its initiative to provide free wireless access to everyone in the city. This was a bold move, and it was followed by other cities; for example, Google recently announced that it would be happy to provide free wi-fi for San Francisco, with ad service to be negotiated. I can’t help but wonder if some bright young thing at the FBI decided now was a good time to remind the FCC of a certain 1994 law on the monitoring of telephone networks and suggest that the law be interpreted as applying to service providers. A mere coincidental benefit to the FBI, of course, would be easy monitoring of the Internet activities of every citizen in major American cities who took advantage of this convenient free service.

The FCC, under the control of its Republican board and Congressional oversight, cheerfully complied with the request of the Justice Department under its Republican Attorney General. And this is the party of small government that calls the Democrats intrusive?

Glass houses.