Feds Ordered to Disclose Data About Wiretap Backdoors

A federal judge is ordering the Justice Department to disclose more information about its so-called “Going Dark” program, an initiative to extend its ability to wiretap virtually all forms of electronic communications.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg of San Francisco concerns the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA. Passed in 1994, the law initially ordered phone companies to make their systems conform to a wiretap standard for real-time surveillance. The Federal Communications Commission extended CALEA in 2005 to apply to broadband providers like ISPs and colleges, but services like Google Talk, Skype or Facebook and encrypted enterprise Blackberry communications are not covered. The FBI has long clamored that these other communication services would become havens for criminals and that the feds would be left unable to surveil them, even though documents acquired by Wired shows that the FBI’s wiretapping system is robust and advanced. Little is known about the “Going Dark” program, though the FBI’s 2011 proposal to require backdoors in encryption found no backers in the White House. The FBI has never publicly reported a single instance in the last five years where encryption has prevented them from getting at the plaintext of messages.