Courageous CEO Discloses that the Secret FISA Court Ordered His ISP to Install Black Box to Copy Data
Photo Credit: FlickrIn the wake of the Snowden revelations, this courageous CEO of a small Internet Service Provider (ISP) in Utah decided to go public with what one of the US’s secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Courts ordered him to do. The CEO is outraged over this apparent violation of the Bill of Rights. Here’s part of his statement:
[The federal agents] 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…
It was open ended. I called six months into it and said, “How long is this going to go on?” and they said, “I don’t know.” I went on for nine months. If it were still there, I would have probably smashed it by now. There have been no [related] arrests that I have heard of…
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”…
We run a Tor node, in some ways as an affirmation of our belief that there are legitimate reasons for being anonymous on the internet. That is where the majority of requests come in from these days. Some illegal traffic comes in through Tor node and we get a federal request through the FBI or DOJ (Department of Justice). I respond to them and say that this is a Tor node [and therefore inaccessible, even to the ISP]; that is usually the end of it. They realize what that is, and it is a dead end.
I am in a little bit of a different situation than large companies. I don’t have a board of directors to answer to. A number of [larger] companies are getting paid for the information. If you go establish a tap on Google’s network, they will charge X amount per month. Usually the government pays it. It isn’t worth it to me to do that kind of wholesale monitoring at any price, and lot of companies disagree with that, because it is a financial issue for them. [They say] if it is worth this much profit, let’s go for it. The return for standing up for people’s constitutional rights and privacy is much greater and more satisfying.
