Study: Wiretaps make us less safe

Responding to a recent federal law that increased the government’s wiretapping abilities, a study co-authored by computer science professor Jennifer Rexford ’91 concluded that more wiretapping can actually make Americans less safe.

The study suggests that data collected from wiretapping could be hacked by terrorists or abused by government agents.

“They can tap into an infrastructure the government essentially built for them,” Rexford said in an interview. “It is a general risk when you create a system to spy on yourself, that people can abuse it.”

The Protect America Act, signed into law by President Bush in August 2007, expanded federal law enforcement’s wiretapping abilities, allowing the wiretapping of electronic communication of citizens “reasonably believed to be located outside the United States” without a warrant.

Rexford said, however, that there is a good possibility that an ordinary citizen’s domestic communication can pass through Canada on its way from Montana to New Jersey and thus become classified as international and be wiretapped without a warrant.

While political leaders on both sides of the aisle and prominent lobbying groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union have denounced the act, Rexford’s main concern is not one of personal rights. On the contrary, the study aims to demonstrate that increased data collection and storage of domestic communication by federal law-enforcement agencies gives terrorists greater incentive to hack the system because the integrity of the communication channels is unknown, Rexford said. She added that rogue groups without the resources to create their own system will use the government’s system to spy on Americans.

Rexford and her co-authors cite the 2004 discovery by Greek officials that their own intelligence system had been used for almost a year to wiretap more than 100 senior government officials. While there is no way to know whether this will happen in the United States, the study argues that the current system is insecure and that better precautions should be taken to protect private citizens’ information.

The government is actually making it harder to find the needle that is Al Qaeda in the increasingly large haystack it has built, Program of Law and Public Affairs director and Wilson School professor Kim Scheppele said. “I don’t think it’s a very rational solution to terrorism,” said Scheppele, who has researched legal issues surrounding the Protect America Act.

But retired CIA inspector general and Wilson School professor Fred Hitz ’61 said that many Americans feel unnecessarily nervous about wiretapping because they don’t know what happens with the information, adding that wiretapped information is destroyed if it is not immediately useful.

“Nobody’s going to be completely happy with it,” Hitz said of the act. “The only problem is that the alternative is worse. We can’t just sit around till the next event occurs and clean up the mess,” he said. “Compared to the threat that we face from Al Qaeda, accumulating info on Americans for a small amount of time is worth it.”

Nevertheless, there may be an acceptable compromise between using the data to fight terrorism and storing it indefinitely on servers with questionable security, the study’s co-authors said.

“There is no substitute [for wiretapping], but it can also be abused,” said co-author Susan Landau ’76, an engineer at Sun Microsystems.

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Co-author and Columbia professor Steven Bellovin added that “the question is not ‘Is wiretapping good or bad?’ ” He and Whitfield Diffie, a co-author and chief security officer at Sun, both said there is a responsibility to maximize data security associated with wiretapping.

Though Hitz said he was not concerned that wiretapping could pose a security risk to Americans, he recognized the concerns the study had raised as legitimate.