Happy Birthday Computer Wiretapping!

A lot’s changed in the world of cyber spying in the last couple of decades. Today, the world is more connected than ever, giving potential hackers endless avenues into computer systems and the sensitive information they host. Over half of Americans are walking around with pocket computers that they use to access the Internet, keep up with email and play overly simplistic games. Warning of the global threat of a cyber attack, the government is also more invasive and—from a civil rights perspective—elusive when it comes to monitoring digital communications. As such, the way that authorities investigate suspicious online activity has evolved profoundly. Twenty years ago, the Feds would’ve hunted down a warrant, taken their time to cover all sides of the investigation, and then given the busted hackers a good slap on the wrist. Today, it’s a mess of warrantless wiretapping, expedited trials, and hard time.

Wiretapping is particularly relevant today because October 23 is the anniversary of the first wiretap on a computer. In 1995, a federal judge gave authorities permission to spy on Argentine national Julio Cesar Ardita, a.k.a. “griton,” (the Spanish word for “screamer”). At the time of the investigation, Ardita was an overly curious computer science student who managed to break into Harvard’s network and steal a bunch of passwords that helped him break into more networks. In a matter of days, Ardita had accessed sensitive information at universities like Caltech, Northeastern, and the University of Massachusetts, as well as government agencies like NASA, the Naval Research Laboratory, and the Naval Command Control and Ocean Surveillance Center.

At the time of Ardita’s hacking spree, Attorney General Janet Reno warned that if “we aren’t vigilant, cybercrime will turn the internet into the Wild West of the 21st Century.” She added, “the Justice Department is determined to pursue cybercriminals at home and abroad.” And the Justice Department has not let Janet down. Today, the task of cybersecurity is getting more funding and attention than ever before. After a number of high profile hacks attributed both to vigilante hacktivist groups like Anonymous and foreign governments like China, the Defense Department and Justice Department alike have doubled down on cybersecurity. President Obama even penned an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal to highlight the danger of a cyber attack and what the government was doing about it.

The government is indeed very serious about catching cyber criminals, so serious that it’s pushing the boundaries of the Bill of Rights and pissing off a whole lot of privacy advocates. Just a month ago, the House of Representatives put its stamp of approval on a five-year renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act, which grants amnesty to telecom companies that grant the National Security Agency with access to pretty much anybody’s phone without a warrant. (Ardita was one of the lucky ones!) The law is leftover from the Patriot Act, and comes with all of the questionable surveillance techniques that a Bush-era policy implies. Meanwhile, the government has gotten much tougher about punishing hackers once they’ve brought them in. There’s even been talk of doling out death sentences to the most extreme cyber criminals.

In a way, the evolution of the government’s tactics are to be expected. Back in 1995, Ardita was using a dial-up modem to snoop around sensitive networks in the U.S., but he wasn’t a terrorist. In fact, the prosecution ultimately argued that he suffered from a hacking addiction, an argument that seemed to work. (He got off with a fine and a couple years of probation.) Now, federal officials suspect that our enemies are building entire armies of hackers to bring down the most important elements of our infrastructure. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has warned of a a “cyber Pearl Harbor” that “could derail passenger trains, or even more dangerous, derail passenger trains loaded with lethal chemicals … or shut down the power grid across large parts of the country.” So the government’s scared. If we’ve learned anything in the past 20 years, it’s that terror is a powerful excuse for the government to stomp on some civil liberties. So happy birthday, computer wiretapping. Glad to see you’ve become so popular.