FBI floats wide-ranging wiretap proposal

Foreign Internet service and applications providers would be required to base inside the country the servers they use for U.S. customers, under a proposal from the U.S. Department of Justice.

The Department of Justice and its FBI division are taking that message to the U.S. Congress and asking lawmakers for a broad rewrite of U.S. wiretapping rules.

However, some members of Congress have ripped into the Chinese government for a similar law requiring Internet providers to locate their servers inside its borders.

U.S. lawmakers have criticized the Chinese law because it allows the government to censor and monitor Internet traffic. The Department of Justice proposal, which would amend a 1994 telephone wiretapping law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), aims to allow the U.S. government easier access to servers so it, too, can monitor communications.

The proposed law, not yet introduced in Congress, would likely set off an arms race in which other countries that want to conduct online surveillance require U.S. companies such as Google and Microsoft to locate servers inside their borders, said John Morris, director of the Internet Standards, Technology and Policy Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group.

"There are countries around the world that would like nothing more than have the United States set the example, to say, 'you have to have a point of presence in my country,'" Morris said.

The CDT included the Department of Justice proposal, pitched to lawmakers during the last couple of months, on its list of "dangerous" tech proposals in Congress. .

The CDT is concerned that Congress could take up the proposal yet this year as lawmakers look for ways to attract voters before the November general election, CDT officials said.

The Department of Justice press office did not return a phone call seeking comment on the proposal.

In February, members of the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee scolded Google, Microsoft and Yahoo officials for allegedly cooperating with the Chinese government's censorship efforts. A day after that hearing, House Rep. Christopher Smith, a New Jersey Republican, introduced a bill that would bar U.S. Internet companies from locating Web servers inside "Internet-restricting" countries such as China and Vietnam, with penalties of up to five years in prison and a $2 million fine for officers of companies that willfully violate the restrictions

Smith's Global Online Freedom Act is awaiting action in the committee.

Morris called the Department of Justice proposal "embarrassing" after lawmakers objected strongly to the Chinese law earlier this year. "The proposal has some horrendous provisions," he said. "The point-of-presence proposal itself would be devastating to the American economy."

The Department of Justice proposal would force vendors of any Internet communications applications to redesign their products to allow wiretapping, Morris said. "The harm to innovation that would follow ... is hard to underestimate," he said.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.