Outsourcing Wiretapping

It's not enough that our government has already, for years, been engaged in illegal wiretapping of US citizens, but apparently the administration has decided to borrow from current business practice and outsource it's insatiable demand to listen in on conversations of Americans.

Mexico has, for years, had a program to wiretap calls made into the country, a fact which has been publicly known. The new angle is the Mexican government intends to expand and modernize the system -- using funding from the US.

By Sam Enriquez, Times Staff Writer
May 25, 2007

MEXICO CITY — Mexico is expanding its ability to tap telephone calls and e-mail using money from the U.S. government, a move that underlines how the country's conservative government is increasingly willing to cooperate with the United States on law enforcement.
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The system will allow authorities to track cellphone users as they travel, according to contract specifications. It includes extensive storage capacity and will allow authorities to identify callers by voice. The system, scheduled to begin operation this month, was paid for by the U.S. State Department and sold by Verint Systems Inc., a politically well-connected firm based in Melville, N.Y., that specializes in electronic surveillance.
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But the contract specifications say the system is designed to allow both governments to "disseminate timely and accurate, actionable information to each country's respective federal, state, local, private and international partners."
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It's unclear how broad a net the new surveillance system will cast: Mexicans speak regularly by phone, for example, with millions of relatives living in the U.S. Those conversations appear to be fair game for both governments.

Legal experts say that prosecutors with access to Mexican wiretaps could use the information in U.S. courts. U.S. Supreme Court decisions have held that 4th Amendment protections against illegal wiretaps do not apply outside the United States, particularly if the surveillance is conducted by another country, Georgetown University law professor David Cole said.
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Renato Sales, a former deputy prosecutor for Mexico City, said Calderon's desire to expand federal policing powers to combat organized crime was parallel to the Bush administration's use of a secret wiretapping program to fight terrorism.

"Suddenly anyone suspected of organized crime is presumed guilty and treated as someone without any constitutional rights," said Sales, now a law professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico. "And who will determine who is an organized crime suspect? The state will."

Federal lawmaker Cesar Octavio Camacho, president of the justice and human rights commission in the lower house of Congress, said he too worried about prosecutorial abuse.

"Although the proposal stems from the president's noble intention of efficiently fighting organized crime," he said, "the remedy seems worse than the problem."

The LA Times has the full article here.

Leaving aside issues internal to Mexico, the article makes clear one target of the wiretapping program will calls to Mexico made by US citizens (and calls made from Mexico to US citizens). These citizens needs not be suspects in any matter, yet it's possible, likely even, their private conversations will be listened into, and any information could be shared back with the US government.

It's not hard at all to think of scenarios where this system could be used and abused. For example, the US government has person X they want to get some info on, but no reasonable grounds for it. However, conveniently person X makes and receives regular phone calls to Mexico. Problem solved! Get the Mexican government to tap all phone calls to and from person X and pass information back to the US. All 4th-amendment rights have been nicely skirted.

As always, there are reasonable purposes presented to justify the program -- Mexico has a real problem with drug violence, particularly in the north of the country along the US border, and a program like this really could help address the issue. However, given the long history of abuse of such programs in Central America (which the article alludes to), who would really trust the government to limit the scope of the program? Historically, governments are addicted to this sort of thing -- give them a little in and they start continuously looking for ways to wedge the opening wider and wider, until the program is far broader than was ever intended.

The direct consequences would be an issue for Mexico to deal with, but if the program expands and more and more information gets shared with our government, then it affects us to. I certainly don't trust any administration, much less the current one, to act properly with regard to programs like this.

If Mexico wants to expand the program, fine, that's their choice -- but then Mexico should pay for it. The US government should not be in the business of forking over funding so foreign governments can do a better job of spying on US citizens.