TechMan: Big Brother soon could be next Facebook friend
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Under new legislation being devised by the Obama administration, the government would be able to listen in on all your Internet communications -- Twitter, Facebook, Skype and others.
The administration plans to propose to Congress legislation that would require all companies with products allowing Internet communication to build in a back door to their encryption. That way the government could quickly monitor conversations.
This would, for the first time, bring peer-to-peer communications services such as Facebook and Skype under the same government surveillance requirements imposed on telecoms by the 1994 Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act.
Court authorization would still be required.
All of this is, of course, in the name of fighting crime and preventing terrorism, in a time when technology is advancing so quickly that the government is falling behind in its ability to crack communications of terrorists and criminals.
In another strengthening of the 1994 law, the government would prevent companies that already are subject to wiretapping orders, like telecoms, from making changes to their systems that would disrupt intercepting calls.
The FBI says it spends $20 million a year to restore wiretapping to systems that have been upgraded.
"The government's answer is 'don't deploy the new services -- wait until the government catches up,' " said Albert Gidari, a lawyer for telecoms. "But that's not how it works. Too many services develop too quickly, and there are just too many players in this now."
Both of these planned changes were reported recently in The New York Times.
In TechMan's opinion, legislation like this would be dangerous and futile.
Sure we all want to catch criminals and prevent terrorism, but weakening every citizens' privacy is not the way to do it. We have seen in the past how much the National Security Agency respects subpoenas and court orders.
And requiring a telecom to worry about violating a law every time it upgrades its network chills innovation.
But the real problem here is that laws like this are futile. The horse is out of the barn: Uncrackable encryption is available as open source code on the Web and criminals and terrorists are savvy enough to use it.
First Published October 24, 2010 12:00 am
