FISA is back
We know now that the Metropolitian Area Exchanges which Verizon operates -- MAE West in San Jose, MAE East in New York, and the rest -- WDC, Miami, Dallas, Chicago, Los Angeles -- have gigataps with black backhaul to ... somewhere. Yesterday Peter Scharr issued a ruling for the member states of the European Union, that ip addresses are personal data.
So what is the legal status of the wiretaps in Verizon's MAEs in Frankfurt and Paris?
Are US nationals protected by EU member state data protection law, by the Treaty of the European Union, when in the territorial jurisdiction of an EU member state? While I'm in Paris next June for the ICANN meeting, using a local ISP to Jabber or Skype or Gizmo to someone in Berlin, say, the Data Protection Commissioner for Berlin, on errors and errata in, or updates to, the P3P specification on the Protection of Personal Privacy since the W3C shutdown the Privacy and P3P project in 2002, on the off chance that I'd like to co-author an update to our last work item -- P3P1.1, which was more or less killed by the governmental data mining rush in personally identifying data that followed 9/11, or contribute to W3C Policy Languages Interest Group, in particular, the meta-language for the provisioning of data protection policy between cooperating data protecting entities, will the United States have the cooperation of French, and/or German authorities, to copy all of my data that transits the Verizon operated MAEs in Europe, as they have in the Verizon operated MAEs in the United States?
There were times when data going from my set of ARPA IMPs (modernly routers) in Menlo Park to the ARPA IMPs in UCLA would not go down the PacTel trunk from SF to LA, instead they'd be routed, with perceptible delay in those 56Kb days, to the ARPA IMPs in Salt Lake, and then to WDC, and then to UCLA. With terrestrial (trans-oceanic) fiber, backhaul from Paris to Halifax to CONUS where the tap may now be (illegally applied), and than backhaul back to Paris, would be much more difficult for the endpoint to detect... unless the traceroute data shows that the packets disapear from the obvious route, and return to it with an increment in the hop count, which is easy enough to forge...
Unless Dodd wins the filibuster, its bedtime for Bonzo for data protection and data or voice personal privacy, and both data and voice for political change tend toward comic. Make some Senatorial aide pick up a phone and chat about the difference between legal, and illegal intercept. Tell them that you'd like a law that will allow you to wiretap your political opponents...
