Executive Chairman and Director of Stroz Friedberg Eric Friedberg, stands in the company’s headquarters in New York. Friedberg, a former prosecutor, conducted what the Justice Department described as the first court approved email wiretap in the history of the Internet in 1995 as he investigated an international conspiracy to peddle cellphones programmed with stolen numbersSAN JOSE, Calif. – Former federal prosecutor Eric Friedberg conducted the first court-approved email wiretap nearly 20 years ago while investigating an international conspiracy to sell fraudulent cellphones.
“It was entirely novel. Even email was new,” he says. “CompuServe, the provider, had no way to comply. They had to build a new port.”
But today, Friedberg, an Internet intelligence pioneer who describes himself as “extremely pro-law enforcement,” is among a growing number of former national security and law enforcement officials who are questioning the current scope of the National Security Agency’s data-gathering programs.
“There’s a legitimate public policy debate about whether it’s worth a societal cost of having a permanent record of every person’s telephone calls for a long time in a single place,” says Friedberg, who grapples with this. Sometimes, he says, people’s freedom “is protected by the difficulty that law enforcement has in obtaining records. If they can look at anything at the push of a button, abuses are more possible.”
Last June, a series of news reports based on classified documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began documenting government surveillance programs that included spying on friendly foreign leaders, analyzing email and Internet use, and gathering phone records of millions of Americans.