Fairfield has joined the hundreds of universities around the country in their opposition to the federal government’s extension of the 11-year-old law, which will now require universities to alter their computer networking services to make it easier for the FBI to monitor potential criminals and terrorists through live wiretaps.
The price tag is $7 billion, which will need to be funded entirely by the universities themselves.
“I am skeptical about unfunded mandates, in general,” said James Estrada, vice president for Information Services. “The problem is that the government is not telling us exactly what they want us to do. There is a big infrastructure behind these walls and it could be a huge investment.”
The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) was passed in 1994 and requires providers of commercial voice services to engineer their networks in such a way to assist law enforcement agencies with wiretap orders. It was extended this year to include universities, libraries and airports providing wireless service and commercial Internet access providers, according to The New York Times.
Because the university is still unsure about how far the federal government wants universities to go with this project, there is no telling how much it will cost Fairfield to comply nor is there any word of a possible tuition increase because of it.
“The problem is that the cost for compliance is high when the government’s orders for wiretaps are so infrequent,” said Estrada. “It is not a question of surveillance, but it is a question of ‘in the event that someone is accused of something, will we incur the cost?'”
Estrada said that in his eight years at Fairfield, he has only received two subpoenas for access to information and he has never received a request for a wiretap. He did not offer further details.
Nationally, in an informal survey of 700 campuses, there were zero reports of wiretap orders being served. Under a 1968 law, the federal government is able to legally intercept all forms of communication. Subpoenas are mainly used for historical information, such as Caller-ID, according to a website put out by Educause, a non-profit association which says it promotes the intelligent use of information technology in higher education.
CALEA allows for wiretaps for real-time information, in which law enforcement officials can hear an exchange. However, as subpoenas are fairly easy to obtain, CALEA makes wiretaps difficult to obtain.
Organizations such as Educause are working to exempt higher education institutions once again from this law, citing the infrequency of wiretap orders on college campuses. Mark Luker, Educause vice president, did, however, advise universities to begin planning how to comply in the meantime, as reported by The New York Times.
Even though the cost is the major source of the contention, many people are concerned about civil liberty and privacy issues.
“I am concerned about civil liberties and what they will do with the wiretaps once they are implemented,” said Estrada.
But according to Dr. Donald Greenberg, a professor of politics, this is not a civil liberties issue since the government needs a warrant to get the information.
“What it is is a colossal waste of time and money,” he said. “It is another example of symbolic overreach on the war on terror while the country gets more vulnerable every
day. It does raise issues of privacy, but we really have very little privacy left.”
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