Group appeals government eavesdropping ruling

GROUP APPEALS GOVERNMENT EAVESDROPPING RULING
[SOURCE: C-Net|News.com, AUTHOR: Declan McCullagh]
A coalition of civil liberties groups and technology companies, including Pulver.com and Sun Microsystems, is appealing a federal court ruling that forces Internet service providers to create backdoors for government wiretapping. The coalition on Friday asked the full U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., to review a June 9 ruling that sided with the Bush administration. That 2-1 ruling said that Internet providers must rewire their networks and follow a complex scheme of eavesdropping regulations. The deadline is set for May 2007. The groups behind the appeal, called an "en banc" rehearing, say they're happy to comply with legitimate court orders. What they're upset about are the cost, difficulty and the privacy concerns involved in building in backdoors for eavesdropping. They argue that the Federal Communications Commission, when approving the requirements, went beyond what federal law actually permits. (The American Council on Education and some of the academic groups dropped out of the appeal, saying they believed the June ruling sufficiently protected their own interests.) No law enforcement agency has identified "any obstacles to intercepting Internet communications in the absence of (the FCC's regulations), and indeed as far as the record on appeal reveals, 100 percent of attempted interceptions of Internet communications to date have been successful," the brief says.
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