The FBI was rather public with its recent demands for backdoor access to websites and Internet services across the board, but as the agency awaits those secret surveillance powers, they're working on their own end to have those e-spy capabilities.
Not much has been revealed about one of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s newest projects, the Domestic Communications Assistance Center, and the FBI will probably try to keep it that way. Despite attempting to keep the DCAC largely under wraps, an investigation spearheaded by Cnet’s Declan McCullagh is quickly collecting details about the agency’s latest endeavor.
Governmental agencies have been searching seemingly without end for ways to pry into the personal communications of computer users in America. Congressional approval and cooperation from Internet companies could be an eternity away, of course, but the FBI might be able to bypass that entirely by taking the matter into their own hands. At the Quantico, Virginia headquarters of the DCAC, federal workers are believed to be already hard at work on projects that will put FBI spies into the Internet, snooping on unsuspecting American’s Skype calls, instant messages and everything else carried out with a mouse and keyboard.
As McCullagh reports, the DCAC doesn’t have a website, let alone press releases detailing their plans. The sparse information that is available, however, paints a scary picture of what the FBI has in mind — and what they aim to accomplish with an $8 million handout from Congress.
In the US Drug Enforcement Agency’s budget request with the Department of Justice for the next fiscal year, the report’s authors write that “the recently established Department-wide Domestic Communications Assistance Center (DCAC)” is being “led by the FBI to address the growing technological gap between law enforcement’s electronic surveillance capabilities and the number and variety of communications devices available to the public.”
In other words, the FBI is pissed that wiretapping isn’t as easy as it used to be.
[
link to rt.com]
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