Spying Illegally on the Wrong Americans (Wired)

[kpete]

Spying Illegally on the Wrong Americans
by mcjoan
Fri Jun 13, 2008 at 06:45:26 AM PDT

Hey Congress, here's another one for you, once again via Ryan Singel at Wired. In reviewing newly declassified documents, Singel not only discovered that the secret, rubberstamping FISA court showed more concern over Bush administration spying than a supposedly-overseeing Congress, but this little gem: "Mobile Phone Number Moving Caused Feds to Wiretap Wrong American."

Mobile Phone Number Moving Caused Feds to Wiretap Wrong American
By Ryan Singel June 12, 2008 | 5:33:29 PM

..............

But there were other fine eavesdropping nuggets in those pages, including info on when the FBI learned to wiretap VOIP calls, how number portability messed with FBI taps, and a moment of candor from an FBI technician about how the FBI's wiretapping software could work with the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program.

For instance, the FBI accidentally listened in on one innocent American phone conversations due to a hack a phone company used to let people take port their phone numbers from one cell provider to another. At issue is a workaround used by CDMA providers, where a carrier assigns an alias number to a ported number in order to speed up switching at a user's usual calling area. The workaround has the unfortunate side effect of occasionally reporting the alias -- which could actually be a real person's number -- instead of the real caller to the FBI's wiretapping software.

In the FBI's own words, "due to misinformation in the call records, the unrelated subscriber was temporarily included in the investigation" and "this error has recently misled a few FBI investigations.

Secondly, in one message thread (.pdf) about moving offices in Manhattan and wiretapping the traditional wireline phone service in March 2006, one FBI employee who works for the FBI's Operational Technology Division asks if the NSA still does warrantless wiretaps and suggests how the FBI's equipment could be configured to deal with the lack of court orders.

more at:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/06/mobile-phone-nu.html
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/6/13/9452/12789/30/534930