By Kim Zetter
Want
to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge
to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law
enforcement and spy agencies?
[wired.com] That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate
student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department
of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a
few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon
and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among
other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their
surveillance price sheets made public.
Yahoo writes in its 12-page objection letter
(.pdf), that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he
would use it “to ’shame’ Yahoo! and other companies — and to ’shock’
their customers.”
“Therefore, release of Yahoo!’s information is reasonably likely to
lead to impairment of its reputation for protection of user privacy and
security, which is a competitive disadvantage for technology
companies,” the company writes.
Verizon took a different stance. It objected to the release
(.pdf) of its Law Enforcement Legal Compliance Guide because it might
“confuse” customers and lead them to think that records and
surveillance capabilities available only to law enforcement would be
available to them as well — resulting in a flood of customer calls to
the company asking for trap and trace orders.
“Customers may see a listing of records, information or assistance
that is available only to law enforcement,” Verizon writes in its
letter, “but call in to Verizon and seek those same services. Such
calls would stretch limited resources, especially those that are
reserved only for law enforcement emergencies.”
Other customers, upon seeing the types of surveillance law
enforcement can do, might “become unnecessarily afraid that their lines
have been tapped or call Verizon to ask if their lines are tapped (a
question we cannot answer).”
Verizon does disclose a little tidbit in its letter, saying that the
company receives “tens of thousands” of requests annually for customer
records and information from law enforcement agencies.
Soghoian filed his records request to discover how much law
enforcement agencies — and thus U.S. taxpayers — are paying for spy
documents and surveillance services with the aim of trying to deduce
from this how often such requests are being made. Soghoian explained
his theory on his blog, Slight Paranoia:
In the summer of 2009, I decided to try and follow the
money trail in order to determine how often Internet firms were
disclosing their customers’ private information to the government. I
theorized that if I could obtain the price lists of each ISP, detailing
the price for each kind of service, and invoices paid by the various
parts of the Federal government, then I might be able to reverse
engineer some approximate statistics. In order to obtain these
documents, I filed Freedom of Information Act requests with every part
of the Department of Justice that I could think of.
The first DoJ agency to respond to his request was the U.S. Marshals
Service (USMS), which indicated that it had price lists available for
Cox Communications, Comcast, Yahoo and Verizon. But because the
companies voluntarily provided the price lists to the government, the
FOIA allows the companies an opportunity to object to the disclosure of
their data under various exemptions. Comcast and Cox were fine with the
disclosure, Soghoian reported.
He found that Cox Communications charges $2,500 to fulfill a pen
register/trap-and-trace order for 60 days, and $2,000 for each
additional 60-day-interval. It charges $3,500 for the first 30 days of
a wiretap, and $2,500 for each additional 30 days. Thirty days worth of
a customer’s call detail records costs $40.
Comcast’s pricing list, which was already leaked to the internet in
2007, indicated that it charges at least $1,000 for the first month of
a wiretap, and $750 per month thereafter.
But Verizon and Yahoo took offense at the request.
Yahoo objected on grounds that its pricing constituted “confidential commercial information” and cited Exemption 4 of the Freedom of Information Act and the Trade Secrets Act.
Exemption 4 of the FOIA refers to the disclosure of commercial or
financial information that could result in a competitive disadvantage
to the company if it were publicly disclosed. The company claims its
pricing is derived from labor rates for employees and overhead and,
therefore, disclosing the information would provide clues to its
operating costs — regardless of whether these same clues are already
available in public records, such as those the company files with the
Securities and Exchange Commission. The company also claims that since
Soghoian is trying to determine the actual amounts the Marshals Service
paid Yahoo for responding to requests, the price lists are irrelevant,
since “there are no standard prices for these transactions.”
But equally important to Yahoo’s objections was the potential for
“criticism” and ridicule. Yahoo quoted Soghoian on his blog writing
that his aim was to “use this blog to shame the corporations that
continue to do harm to user online privacy.”
Yahoo also objected to the disclosure of its letter objecting to the
disclosure of pricing information saying that “release of this letter
would likely cause substantial competitive harm” to the company. The
company added, in a veiled threat, that if the Marshals Service were to
show anyone its letter objecting to the disclosure of pricing
information, it could “impair the government’s ability to obtain
information necessary for making appropriate decisions with regard to
future FOIA requests.”
If anyone out there has a copy of Verizon or Yahoo’s law enforcement
pricing list and wants to share it, feel free to use our anonymous tip
address.
Image: FBI.gov
Source: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/wiretap-prices/
