Concerns that United States intelligence agencies are spying on their own citizens could cause Nixon-era protections to be strengthened for the Internet age.
As more information surfaces about Echelon, a secret program to extensively monitor foreign communications, policy analysts and legislators have become increasingly worried that such operations have been used to place Americans under surveillance instead. Echelon is run by the United States, in cooperation with the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.
The end result: US laws that cover operations such as Echelon may be strengthened to protect citizens' communications from being caught by a comprehensive electronic net.
"There are laws drafted in the late '70s that haven't been updated since then. Now they have to deal with 21st-century technology," said Brad Alexander, communications director for Representative Bob Barr, a Georgia Republican who called for investigations of US intelligence-gathering activities last year. "As communications take place in the over-arching Internet, a lot of questions remain unanswered," Alexander said.
Earlier this year, officials from the National Security Agency (the government organisation responsible for overseeing Echelon) and the Central Intelligence Agency presented to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence the guidelines they use to determine the legality of each interception .
Concerns not answered
But the inherent secrecy involved in the agencies' actions and the deliberations of the committee have done little to answer the charges.
"This is more a matter of getting a sense of how they interpret relatively old statutes," said David Sobel, general counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Centre.
EPIC has requested the documents that both the CIA and the NSA handed over to the committee, using a Freedom of Information Act request.
Presently, US intelligence-gathering activities -- including Echelon -- fall under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. It became law after Senate hearings in the mid-'70s investigated intelligence agencies' extensive surveillance of US citizens, including anti-Vietnam War demonstrators. Yet, at that time, the Internet had just started to grow, and the World Wide Web did not exist.
"The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) goes back to a different world than we are in now," Sobel said.
Problems for a new age
Information Age problems now abound.
Jurisdiction becomes a major issue on the worldwide Internet: If US citizens in Alaska and California are chatting on the Internet, can the NSA intercept the communications in Canada? And the line between observation and surveillance is blurred on the Net: Are Web page requests public information, or is their capture considered surveillance?
Such issues may pose conundrums for constitutional lawyers, but the NSA, unsurprisingly perhaps, believes that current laws suffice. While the agency would not comment for this article, US Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, director of the NSA, in April told the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that "the privacy framework [of the laws] is technology-neutral and does not require amendment to accommodate new communications technology."
Under FISA, a judge may determine US citizens to be a foreign agent -- thus giving intelligence operatives the OK to spy -- only if there is information that points to the individual being a spy, terrorist, saboteur or accomplice. "A concerted effort [has been] made to balance the country's need for foreign intelligence information with the need to protect core individual privacy rights," Hayden said.
While Sobel stressed that it's too early to tell whether the materials they have received so far will indicate any wrongdoing, the group is working with Duncan Campbell, journalist and expert on Echelon, to create a report outlining the extent to which the NSA has been watching Americans.
The group expects to release a report on its findings late this season.
