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Secret orders Another possibly related effort is the Bush administration's so-called Cyber Initiative. In January, President Bush signed a pair of secret orders--National Security Presidential Directive 54/Homeland Security Presidential Directive 23 - that apparently deal with detecting and preventing Internet disruptions. Rep. Issa is a member of the House Intelligence Committee, which held a closed-door hearing on Thursday devoted to the
Cyber Initiative - and, during the exchange with Mueller a day earlier, he said his monitoring idea was related. The House Intelligence committee didn't want to talk when pressed by CNet. But a representative of the House Homeland Security committee chaired by Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) sent three bullet points in an e-mail message: 1. Chance of a legislative initiative that would allow FBI to place filters to identify illegal activity at choke points on the .com space: 2. We still have concerns and questions about the initiative, and we continue to do oversight. 3. Legislation is not being considered for any of the new proposals, outside of the budget requests made by the administration. Point 3 seems to relate to the administration's 2009 budget request, which asks Congress for $293.5 million to expand Einstein to the entire federal government. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which is headed by Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, also held a classified hearing last month on the administration's Cyber Initiative. But a committee aide told CNet: "The idea of filtering for criminal activity has never been discussed with us. Nor has any new statutory authority been discussed. In fact, the administration explicitly said it didn't need any legislation. Furthermore, the idea of monitoring nongovernment domains has never been proposed in briefings the committee has received." Of some comfort is McCullagh's observation that at least in the current political climate, legislation of the sort Rep. Issa wants to draft isn't likely to slide through Congress unopposed. Still, as McCullagh opines, it's worth keeping in mind that the FBI has a recent, and not very flattering, history of trying to expand the scope of surveillance methods. Bureau agents used so-called exigent letters to obtain records from telephone companies, claiming that an emergency situation existed. In reality, there was often no emergency at all. The Justice Department's inspector general found similar abuses of national-security letters. The FBI also tried to bypass the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court when it denied requests to obtain records. The CNet article ends with the valid comment that maybe Director Mueller can provide a convincing argument for why laws giving the FBI "omnibus search capability utilizing filters that would identify the illegal activity" would be wise. Or not. But when politicians weigh the idea of trusting the FBI with such broad and unprecedented authority, they should consider the abuses that have already taken place with far less powerful tools.