Telecom Spying: Feds Must Release Records

by: Foiled Goil

An electronic privacy group challenging President Bush's domestic spying program scored a minor victory after a judge ordered the federal government to release information about lobbying efforts by telecommunications companies to protect them from prosecution.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation in January 2006 filed a class-action suit against AT&T Inc., accusing the company of illegally making communications on its networks available to the National Security Agency without warrants.

Congress is now considering changing the law to grant retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that would protect them from such court challenges.

The EFF wants to know about "discussions, briefings or other exchanges" telecommunications companies and members of Congress have had recently with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence regarding changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, according to Tuesday's court order. U.S. District Judge Susan Illston said "all responsive, non-exempt documents" or anything required to be released under the Freedom of Information Act must be turned over by Dec. 10.

While EFF lawyer David Sobel acknowledged he's unsure what he'll learn from the documents, he said they should shed some light on why the companies believe they need protection.

The EFF suit against AT&T is just one of about two dozen suits against telecommunications companies over the wiretapping program. Those cases have been consolidated in San Francisco's federal appeals court.

FISA requires the government to obtain court approval before conducting electronic surveillance on U.S. soil, even if the target is a foreign citizen in a foreign country.

Late Tuesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) won the speedy release of telecom lobbying records from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI).

The agency was ordered to comply with a new December 10 deadline -- in time for the documents to play a role in the congressional debate over granting amnesty for telecommunications companies taking part in illegal electronic surveillance. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Susan Illston vacates a hearing on the matter previously scheduled for Friday.

"We are pleased Judge Illston recognized that time was running out for these documents to make a difference in the legislative debate. She agreed that the Administration is dragging its feet in making relevant information available and stressed that the public has a right to full disclosure before Congress acts on the pending telecom amnesty proposals," said EFF Senior Counsel David Sobel.

EFF sued for release of the documents after ODNI's slow response to EFF's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to disclose information about any telecom lobbying activity. In the meantime, debate in Congress heated up over proposed changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), including proposals aimed at letting telecoms off the hook for their role in warrantless spying on millions of ordinary Americans.

(For the full order from Judge Illston: click here.)

This program examines just how far the government has gone with its surveillance program, and features EFF Legal Director Cindy Cohn discussing EFF's ongoing case against AT&T for its illegal collaboration with the NSA. AT&T whisleblower Mark Klein also tells his compelling story about his discovery of a "secret room" diverting AT&T network traffic to the NSA.

As Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald put it, the documentary "powerfully dramatizes the severity of privacy erosion at the hands of a federal government operating largely in the dark."

Check your local listings for times, or you can always watch the program on the Frontline website. Then tell lawmakers to stop the spying and to block amnesty for telecoms that broke the law.

In the wake of the detection and reporting of Comcast Corporation's controversial interference with Internet traffic, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has published a comprehensive account of Comcast's packet-forging activities and has released software and documentation instructing Internet users on how to test for packet forgery or other forms of interference by their own ISPs.

"Comcast is discriminating among different kinds of Internet traffic based on the protocols being used by its customers," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "When confronted, Comcast has been evasive and misleading in its responses, so we decided to start gathering the facts ourselves."

"This recent interference by Comcast in their subscribers' Internet communications is a cause for grave concern," said EFF Staff Technologist Peter Eckersley. "It threatens the open Internet standards and architecture that have made the network such an engine of technical and economic innovation."

In addition to an account of the results of EFF's independent testing of Comcast's packet forging activities, EFF has also issued a detailed document and software to assist other networking experts in conducting their own testing.

"If ISPs won't give their customers accurate information about their Internet traffic controls, we have to detect and document them for ourselves," said EFF Staff Technologist Seth Schoen.

Comcast is the second largest Internet Service Provider (ISP) in the United States. They run the cable TV and cable Internet networks in many parts of the United States, and many consumers know them as their duopoly or monopoly provider of residential broadband Internet access.

Some time around May 2007, Comcast installed new software or equipment on its networks that began selectively interfering with some of Comcast's customers' TCP/IP connections. The most widely discussed interference was with certain BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing communications, but other protocols have also been affected. This white paper is intended to set forth the current state of public knowledge about Comcast's interference activities.

Certain Internet service providers have begun to interfere with their users' communications by injecting forged or spoofed packets - data that appears to come from the other end but was actually generated by an Internet service provider (ISP) in the middle. This spoofing is one means (although not the only means) of blocking, jamming, or degrading users' ability to use particular applications, services, or protocols. One important means of holding ISPs accountable for this interference is the ability of some subscribers to detect and document it reliably. We have to learn what ISPs are doing before we can try to do something about it. Internet users can often detect interference by comparing data sent at one end with data received at the other end of a connection.

Techniques like these were used by EFF and the Associated Press to produce clear evidence that Comcast was deliberately interfering with file sharing applications; they have also been used to document censorship by the Great Firewall of China. In each of these cases, an intermediary was caught injecting TCP reset packets that caused a communication to hang up - even though the communicating parties actually wanted to continue talking to one another. In this document, we describe how to use a network analyzer like Wireshark to run an experiment with a friend and detect behavior like this. Please note that these instructions are intended for use by technically experienced individuals who are generally familiar with Internet concepts and are comfortable installing software, examining and modifying their computers' administrative settings, and running programs on a command line.

In May 2007, Comcast began engaging in protocol-specific interference with the activities of its subscribers. When confronted by users and by EFF, Comcast responded with denials and answers that told less than the whole story. In October 2007, however, after independent testing by the Associated Press and EFF, it became clear that Comcast is, in fact, interfering with BitTorrent, Gnutella, and potentially other common file sharing protocols employed by millions of Internet users. In specific, it appears that Comcast is injecting forged RST packets into TCP communications, in an effort to disrupt certain protocols commonly used for file-sharing. The interference efforts appear to be triggered by the protocol that a subscriber uses, not by the number of connections made or amount of bandwidth used by the subscriber.

In the wake of this set of revelations and in response to the lack of detailed technical information from Comcast, EFF has continued its independent testing of Comcast's protocol-specific interference efforts (at the same time, others have sued Comcast and filed petitions with the FCC).

At a minimum, consumers deserve a complete description of what they are getting when they buy "unlimited Internet access" from an ISP.

Policy-makers, as well, need to understand what is actually being done by ISPs in order to pierce the evasive and ambiguous rhetoric employed by some ISPs to describe their interference activities.

Accordingly, EFF is developing information and software tools intended to help subscribers test their own broadband connections. While these tests initially will require a relatively high degree of technical knowledge, we hope that we will be able to develop tools that will bring these testing efforts within reach of more subscribers.

This web page will collect EFF's white papers, software tools, blog entries, and other materials relating to this ongoing project.

---

Telecoms · Filtering · Net · Neutrality