When people say the feds are monitoring what people are doing online, what does that mean? How does that work? When, and where, does it start?



Pete Ashdown, CEO of XMission, an internet service provider in Utah, knows. He received a Foreign Intelligence Service Act (FISA) warrant in 2010 mandating he let the feds monitor one of his customers, through his facility. He also received a broad gag order. In his own words:

The first thing I do when I get a law enforcement request is look for a court signature on it. Then I pass it to my attorneys and say, "Is this legitimate? Does this qualify as a warrant?" If it does, then we will respond to it. We are very up front that we respond to warrants.

If it isn't, then the attorneys write back: "We don't believe it is in jurisdiction or is constitutional. We are happy to respond if you do get an FBI request in jurisdiction or you get a court order to do so."

The FISA request was a tricky one, because it was a warrant through the FISA court — whether you believe that is legitimate or not. I have a hard time with secret courts. I ran it past my attorney and asked, "Is there anyway we can fight this?" and he said "No. It is legitimate."

It was also different [from other warrants] because it was for monitoring. They wanted to come in and put in equipment on my network to monitor a single customer. The customer they were monitoring was a particular website that was very benign. It seems ridiculous to me. It was beyond absurd. It wasn't like a guns and ammo website.

They came in and showed me papers. It was a court order from the FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) for the intercept, with the agent's name... and the court's information. I think it was three or four pages of text. They wouldn't let met me copy them. They let me take notes in regards to technical aspects of what they wanted to do.

We had to facilitate them to set up a duplicate port to tap in to monitor that customer's traffic. It was a 2U (two-unit) PC that we ran a mirrored ethernet port to.

[What we ended up with was] a little box in our systems room that was capturing all the traffic to this customer. Everything they were sending and receiving. (Ed note: it would have looked a lot like the picture below — a typical, black, two-unit server, unremarkable among many others.)