ISP CEO Explains What Happens When The NSA Shows Up At Your Door

from the police-state dept

As a bunch of folks have been sending in, Buzzfeed has the incredible story from the CEO of independent ISP XMission, Pete Ashdown (who, by the way, has also run for Senator in Utah, and has a really good take on copyright law), talking about what happened when the NSA knocked on his door. Ashdown talks about how the company deals with various law enforcement warrants it gets, and how what they get from the FISA court is different, because, as he notes, "I have a hard time with secret courts." However, the time they got one -- with an order to monitor one single customer -- his lawyers told him they couldn't fight back, and the NSA said that they needed to install their own box on his network.

It was also different [from other warrants] because it was for monitoring. They wanted to come in and put in equipment on my network to monitor a single customer. The customer they were monitoring was a particular website that was very benign. It seems ridiculous to me. It was beyond absurd. It wasn’t like a guns and ammo website.

They came in and showed me papers. It was a court order from the FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) for the intercept, with the agent’s name… and the court’s information. I think it was three or four pages of text. They wouldn’t let met me copy them. They let me take notes in regards to technical aspects of what they wanted to do.

We had to facilitate them to set up a duplicate port to tap in to monitor that customer’s traffic. It was a 2U (two-unit) PC that we ran a mirrored ethernet port to.

[What we ended up with was] a little box in our systems room that was capturing all the traffic to this customer. Everything they were sending and receiving.

He talks about employees asking about it, and him not really being able to tell them. He also notes that the whole thing was totally open-ended, with the NSA never saying when the monitoring would end. He also notes that there's more he could tell, but it would likely violate the gag order (in fact, he wonders if what he wrote for Buzzfeed violates the gag order already). Ashdown, then, rightly points out just how ridiculous this gag order is:

These programs that violate the Bill of Rights can continue because people can’t go out and say, “This is my experience, this is what happened to me, and I don’t think it is right.”

There is absolutely [a] need for secrecy when you are dealing with a criminal investigation. You don’t want to tip off criminals being monitored. But you can’t say, “You can never talk about this ever, for the rest of your life.”

The FISA court should be a public court, and documents should be sealed for a set period of time, [to] let people audit the actions later.

He notes that this particular monitoring experience ended about two years ago, and he wonders if he'll hear from them for talking about the experience, but he's willing to face up to that. Of course, there are very, very few ISP owners who are willing to stand up and talk like this. Beyond Ashdown, the short list includes Nicholas Merrill and I'm not sure who else. If more internet companies were willing to speak up, it would help bring more clarity to what's going on, even if they faced some significant backlash in doing so.

Also, wouldn't it have been really nice if Ashdown had won his Senate race last time around and been in the Senate right now instead of Orrin Hatch. While all these surveillance stories have been going down, what has Hatch been up to, other than trying to give his friends in Hollywood more power to negotiate trade agreements that benefit themselves?

Filed Under: black box, fisa court, gag orders, nsa, nsa surveillance, pete ashdown, secrecy
Companies: xmission

Challenger To Senator Orrin Hatch, Pete Ashdown, Also Against SOPA

from the make-it-a-campaign-issue dept

In the comments of our recent post about another candidate for the House using SOPA as a campaign issue, one commenter pointed out that there's a Senate challenger likely to make SOPA an issue as well. Pete Ashdown, who studied computer science and founded and ran an ISP in Utah for many years, is running against long-term incumbent Senator Orrin Hatch. Ashdown, as you may recall, actually ran against Hatch six years ago as well, and was really good on tech related policies. His position statement on copyright is a good read, focusing on how both copyright extension and the DMCA cause undue burden on the public:

Congressional extensions on copyright have been repeatedly pushed by interested businesses to the point where the public interest is damaged. Copyright should protect artists and creators when they take action to request it. Instead, it is abused to the point that innovation is held back and very little falls into the public domain.

The public has an interest in seeing works move into the public domain after a reasonable period has passed for commercial gain. Abandoned and orphaned works should default into the public domain instead of being locked up indefinitely.

Legislation like the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) strips the consumer of their rights to own and modify their purchased property. DMCA abuse has been leveraged against everything from real-estate listings to restricting competitors. If the DMCA had been present before this millennium, it is possible that Compaq would have never been able to reverse-engineer the IBM PC BIOS and jumpstart the personal computing revolution.

While I don't know how recently it has been updated, it doesn't mention things like PIPA or SOPA. However, Ashdown has tweeted about the bills and it appears he's not a fan. Given that he actually used Hatch's ridiculous INDUCE Act (another bill that attempted to broadly expand copyright law) as a campaign issue in 2006, you have to imagine he'll use PIPA again this time around. While he lost last time around, in 2006, very few people were paying attention to these issues. This time around, as SOPA and PIPA are getting more attention, perhaps he'll get more attention.

That said, as the same commenter noted, getting a Democrat elected in Utah is close to impossible. Still, Ashdown was able to get over 30% of the vote on a shoestring budget, while many of these issues weren't making news. At a time when these issues are making headlines, and outrage towards incumbents for being in the pockets of a few big businesses is at an all time high, could he actually mount a serious challenge?

Filed Under: orrin hatch, pete ashdown, pipa, protect ip, sopa, utah