Salon.com > Jeffrey Benner

Every dial you take

Tue, 18 Jun 2002 19:30:00 +0000

On April 11, the Federal Communications Commission ordered the telecom industry to upgrade their systems to meet a list of FBI specifications by June 30. The upgrades give the FBI expanded wiretapping capabilities, including the ability to extract specific information about phone calls without a warrant.

The FCC order comes after years of wrangling among the FCC, the FBI, civil liberties groups, and telecom companies over exactly what telecom companies have to do to comply with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) of 1994. When the FCC issued a nearly identical order three years ago, an industry-advocate alliance fought it to a standstill in the courts. But this time around, the same groups have not so much as issued a press release in protest.

"It's awful, the fact no one is willing to challenge this," says Al Gidari, a lawyer who advises telecom firms on compliance with government surveillance issues. "It's a sign of the times after 9/11. No one wants to be perceived as anti-government or anti-law enforcement."

Getting a lock on broadband

Fri, 07 Jun 2002 23:04:00 +0000

The Federal Communications Commission is quietly handing over control of the broadband Internet to a handful of massive corporations.

In March, the FCC ruled that cable companies do not have to open their networks to competing Internet service providers, or ISPs. A FCC proposal to extend the same exemption to DSL service is pending. If approved, the proposal will allow local phone companies, now down to four "Baby Bells," to deny other DSL providers access to local phone networks. Currently, all DSL providers are guaranteed access to phone networks under the FCC's interpretation of federal telecommunications law.

Telecommunications, cable, and media companies (increasingly one and the same) and their allies in Congress have campaigned for years to deregulate most aspects of the telecom industry. Under the current administration, and the leadership of FCC chairman Michael Powell, those efforts have finally begun to pay off.

Public money, private code

Fri, 04 Jan 2002 20:29:00 +0000

Would the creation of the Internet be allowed to happen today?

The networked society we live in is in large part a gift from the University of California to the world. In the 1980s, computer scientists at Berkeley working under contract for the Defense Department created an improved version of the Unix operating system, complete with a networking protocol called the TCP/IP stack. Available for a nominal fee, the operating system and network protocol grew popular with universities and became the standard for the military's Arpanet computer network. In 1992, Berkeley released its version of Unix and TCP/IP to the public as open-source code, and the combination quickly became the backbone of a network so vast that people started to call it, simply, "the Internet."

Many would regard giving the Internet to the world as a benevolent act fitting for one of the world's great public universities. But Bill Hoskins, who is currently in charge of protecting the intellectual property produced at U.C. Berkeley, thinks it must have been a mistake. "Whoever released the code for the Internet probably didn't understand what they were doing," he says.