WASHINGTON, DC — FBI Director Robert Mueller on Wednesday called for new legislation that would grant the FBI “omnibus” surveillance authority over public and private internet traffic and communications.The authority to intercept and rifle through communications should include all internet traffic, “whether it be dot-mil, dot-gov, dot-com — whatever you’re talking about,” Mueller told a House of Representatives Judiciary Committee hearing.
Despite the potential for the proposal to offend the Fourth Amendment’s guarantees against unreasonable search and seizure, at least one Republican on the committee indicated he would support it. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) voiced support after Mueller assured him the proposal “balances on one hand the privacy rights of people receiving information with … the necessity of having some omnibus search capability, utilizing filters that would identify illegal activity as it goes through, and allow us the ability to catch it at a choke point.”
Critics worry Mueller’s proposal is vague when defining “illegal activity”: Does the phrase refer specifically to terrorist threats, denial-of-service-attacks and other cybercrimes, or could it be expanded to include online gambling, distribution of sexually explicit imagery or other activities that aren’t as clearly “illegal?”
Mueller’s proposal was only one part of a larger discussion that focused primarily on the Bush administration’s so-called “cyberinitiative” and the shadowy component part of the program known as Einstein.
Einstein is a surveillance program designed to watch only government networks, not private ones. Although the program already is in place at 15 federal agencies, the Department of Homeland Security is still preparing the privacy impact statements required before it can be rolled out government-wide. The estimated cost for the program: $293 million taxpayer dollars.
It was at the point Mueller was reporting on Einstein’s progress that Issa became curious.
“What authorities do you need in order to monitor, looking for those illegal activities, and then act on those both defensively and, either yourself or certainly other agencies, offensively in order to shut down a crime in process?” he asked.
That opened the door for Mueller to set up his omnibus proposal, to which Issa responded that perhaps the FBI already had the authority it sought if only it would seek voluntary cooperation from portions of the private sector that would like to be “defended” by the federal government’s secret watchdogs.
