Students and faculty beware: the government has given themselves permission to wiretap Internet activity on campuses across the United States.
Law enforcement may have the authority to tap any ETSU Internet activity by the end of 2007. And the university must pay for it.
The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) was passed in 1994 to aid law enforcement in executing wiretaps.
CALEA was originally intended primarily for phone taps, but on Aug. 5, 2005, the Federal Communications Commission extended the act to include facilities-based Internet service providers, such as colleges, universities and libraries.
Wiretapping is not a new development. In 1968, Congress passed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act to ensure that law enforcement get proper court authorization before conducting a wiretap. CALEA does not change the legal requirements of a wiretap, but instead requires that providers, such as a university, to engineer their Internet system to make wiretapping easier and less expensive.
“What they are starting to talk about is other types of electronic communication,” said Mark Bragg, assistant vice president and chief information officer of information technology at ETSU. “There’s not a real definitive statement on what we are going to be required to do, if anything. It’s a lot of floozy right now. There’s the uncertainty of what we are going to be held subject to and there’s a lot of equipment that may not even exist today.”
One of the major uncertainties about CALEA is figuring how much it will cost the university to install the proper equipment. “If they’re concerned about you communicating with someone off campus, that’s one thing,” Bragg said. “We can put a single device on the edge of our network, as your traffic goes to the Internet. But if they want to know what a person in Lucille Clement is communicating with someone on Buc Ridge, that’s another story. It never leaves our campus.”
To monitor information that doesn’t leave the campus, the entire Internet system may have to be rebuilt, Bragg said. There are more than 12,000 campus Internet ports, including ETSU facilities in Bristol, Kingsport, Elizabethton and the VA campus that would have to be replaced.
“That would cost us millions of dollars,” Bragg said. “But it’s never been said we would have to do that.”
While the rules of whom and what will be monitored are still unclear, the act will likely require law enforcement to monitor a specific person or time range, Bragg said. CALEA concerns “real-time communications,” which allows law enforcement to hear (or read) the exchange as it is taking place.
“We have a process that law enforcement has to go through,” Bragg said. “We do not just open the doors and say ‘Yeah, what do you want to look at? Come on.’ We value the privacy of your data.”
ETSU is working with Educause, an association that advances higher education by supporting the intelligent use of information technology, to relieve the higher education community from full CALEA compliance.
Educause’s argument says it is not in the public interest to require every college, school and library to redesign its networks in the event that a lawful request for surveillance may arise in the future.
For more information on CALEA and college campuses, visit www.educause.com.For information on student Internet activity call Mark Bragg at 439-4137 or e-mail STET at bragg@etsu.edu.

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