Snooping in the sky

By N.B. | Washington, D.C.

GOGO WIRELESS, the dominant provider of in-flight Wi-Fi in (or, rather, above) America, goes above and beyond what the law requires it to do to enable government snooping on its users, Wired reported last month. The key evidence for this charge came in a letter GoGo's attorney, Karis Hastings, sent to America's Federal Communications Commission in 2012:

In designing its existing network, Gogo worked closely with law enforcement to incorporate functionalities and protections that would serve public safety and national security interests.... [FCC rules] do not require licensees to implement capabilities to support law enforcement beyond those outlined in [federal law]. Nevertheless, Gogo worked with federal agencies to reach agreement regarding a set of additional capabilities to accommodate law enforcement interests. Gogo then implemented those functionalities into its system design.

GoGo hasn't explained what "additional capabilities" it incorporated into its system. Wired speculates that they might be similar to those described by an executive at Aircell, a GoGo subsidiary, in an interview with Flight Global in 2009:

The Aircell executive told Flight Global that ... it could immediately shut off service to select individuals or an entire airplane– without shutting the service off to U.S. air marshals–if authorities determined there was a security threat to the plane.

But the executive also described surveillance capabilities that go beyond what [federal law] generally provides. [Federal law] he said, “allows the feds to collect information about who is using the system, on which devices, and what the traffic looks like. Aircell can give [law enforcement] any information they need in real time.”

The FCC letter was first highlighted by Christopher Soghoian, a technology expert who works for the American Civil Liberties Union.

GoGo's response to all this has been confusing and muddled. The company seems to be suggesting Mr Soghoian is wrong—a spokesman told Wired that GoGo's "capabilities and what we adhere to are exactly what any communications provider, including on the ground networks, adhere to.... Nothing more and nothing less." But the spokesman also acknowledgedthat the company made unspecified "secondary concessions" to law enforcement. So what's the truth here?

GoGo needs to be more specific (it did not respond to Gulliver's request for clarification). If it can't reveal the details of these "secondary concessions" because the government asked or told it not to, it should say that. Otherwise, it should explain exactly which capabilities it has given law enforcement, if any, that go above and beyond what the law requires. Presumably, if GoGo did grant law enforcement additional capabilities to access, monitor or control its network, it did so because company leaders believed it was the right thing to do. If that is the case, the company should say so, and explain the reasoning behind its decision. And if the company's letter to the FCC was inaccurate, or the Aircell executive's statement to Flight Global in 2009 was wrong, GoGo should detail what happened and why. This is an important issue and GoGo—which is facing new competition from AT&T—owes its customers a full explanation.