Ryan Singel at Threat Level crunches the numbers on the time required to complete FISA warrants:
The Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told an El Paso reporter that the nation’s spy laws needed to be loosened because it takes 200 hours to prepare a FISA warrant for the special spy court.
In 2006, the government filed 2,181 such applications with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court. The court approved 2,176. 2006 FISA Warrant Applications.
That means government employees spent 436,200 hours writing out foreign intelligence wiretaps in 2006. That’s 53,275 workdays.
Let’s assume dedicated government employees work 40 hours a week with two weeks off a year. That means there were 218 government employees with top secret clearances sitting in rooms, writing only FISA warrants.
Singel characterizes this as “a lot of monkeys,” but it doesn’t strike me as a very big number. If each employee costs the government $200,000/year, then that means complying with FISA cost the federal government less than $50 million. You could increase the volume of FISA requests by a factor of 20, bringing the cost to $1 billion, and it would still be only about 2 percent of the intelligence budget. So even assuming McConnell is telling the truth about the paperwork burden, it hardly seems like an unreasonable burden on the intelligence community.
That’s part of an excellent post on Wired‘s Threat Level blog, pointing out how silly the notion of “cyberwar” is:
In truth, U.S. network operators already deal with DDoS attacks of a similar, or greater, magnitude than the ones that hit Estonia. Peters argues that critical U.S. military networks and weapons systems could fall. Malware is getting pretty sophisticated, I’ll admit, but I’ve yet to see a bot that can send packets from the public internet to a classified, air gapped Air Force network. If it exists, it can also do your laundry and walk your dog.
Peters even cracks open the old chestnut about American facing an electronic “Pearl Harbor.” Cue Ricky Martin on your Rio and it could be 1999 all over again.
Erstwhile roommate and recent podcast guest Julian Sanchez will be on a panel at the Center for American Progress today at 10:30. If you’re not in the DC area, you can apparently catch it on C-SPAN II.
Over at Ars Nate Anderson makes an important point that hadn’t occurred to me: The cell phone unlocking exception I mentioned in my last post applies only to the act of circumvention, not to trafficking in circumvention devices. That means that you’re safe if you unlock your own iPhone, but if you develop software or hardware to help others do so, you could wind up in legal hot water under the DMCA.
Of course, that depends on whether unlocking your cell phone is an act of circumvention in the first place. It’s not obvious that cell phone locks “effectively controls access” to a copyrighted work. Perhaps AT&T could argue that unlocking your phone is the first step toward pirating ringtones, but it should be possible to develop a hacking tool that enables carrier-switching without enabling ring-tone piracy.
In any event, this is almost certainly not the sort of situation Congress had in mind when they passed the DMCA.
I was going to elaborate on Cord’s post, but as luck would have it other people have beaten me to it. First, Tom Lee points out that phone unlocking is one of the DMCA exemptions granted by the Library of Congress in its triennial review process. So iPhone hackers are safe from the DMCA. However, there are other potential issues:
Apple may still have some claim against the iPhone hackers. That’s because circumvention devices typically employ code that’s the property of the device designer. Unless I’m mistaken, the DMCA exemption doesn’t grant anyone the right to use or redistribute others’ code. It’s also possible that circumventing the protection may necessitate the violation of patents held by the device designer.
A similar situation exists in the world of Xbox modding. Until recently it was easy to buy a modchip online. Properly installed, this allows you to turn your Xbox into a device that can run Linux, emulate older consoles, or act as a media center (and, yes, you can play pirated games, too).
Is it even possible for companies to strike exclusive deals when teams of nerds across the country have been at work on hacking the iPhone since it’s release in late June? Engadget declared the Apple/AT&T exclusivity deal dead at noon on Friday, so sorry if this story is a little old, but now that media outlets like Wired, BusinessWeek, and CNN are covering the story, I thought that TLF should also weigh in.
I don’t know if I should view this as good news, bad news, or just another lesson in the folly of trying to lock-out the tech set from something as desirable as the iPhone. Exclusivity deals, from a policy standpoint, are like most any other private, legal arrangement to me–they’re perfectly fine. However, the corporate managers of the world may want to start reconsidering exclusivity arrangements that rely on hack-proof tech. Why? Because no such thing exists.
In July, I mentioned the interesting comparison chart that Verizon’s Link Hoewing put together comparing contracts, competition, coverage, prices, new services, and more in both the U.S. and European cellular markets.
* The U.S. wireless market offers more choice and is less concentrated than any Western country’s wireless market;
* U.S. consumers use an average of 800 wireless minutes per month, while most European consumers use less that 200 minutes per month;
* U.S. wireless prices are the lowest in the world, with the exception of Hong Kong; and
* The combination of higher usage at lower prices presents compelling evidence that the overall consumer welfare derived from wireless service is higher in the U.S. than internationally.
“In summary, a comparison of international statistics suggests that the U.S. wireless market, in fact, leads its European counterparts, and the U.S. wireless market, compared to Europe, appears to be more competitive and vibrant. The contention that concentration leads to higher prices, lower usage and decreasing consumer welfare does not appear to be a U.S. problem, and furthermore, the contention that the U.S. lags the European market and needs some regulatory remedy is without empirical merit.”
PFF’s 2007 “Aspen Summit” featured some amazing panels and keynote addresses, and now they have all been posted online. Here are some of the highlights:
* Eric Schmidt, Chairman & CEO, Google Inc., Chairman’s Dinner keynote address
* Laurence H. Tribe, Carl M. Loeb University Professor, Harvard Law School, keynote address on “Freedom of Speech and Press in the 21st Century: New Technology Meets Old Constitutionalism”
* Dale W. Jorgenson, Samuel W. Morris University Professor of Economics, Harvard University keynote address on “Whatever Happened to the New Economy?”
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.