[FYI] Will FBI Decide Internet Configuration?
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March 16, 2004
Will FBI Decide Internet Configuration?
? posted by Dan Gillmor 08:56 AM
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# Washington Post: Easier Internet Wiretaps Sought. The Justice
Department wants to significantly expand the government's ability to
monitor online traffic, proposing that providers of high-speed
Internet service should be forced to grant easier access for FBI
wiretaps and other electronic surveillance, according to documents
and government officials. A petition filed this week with the Federal
Communications Commission also suggests that consumers should be
required to foot the bill.
Civil liberties groups are calling this request "breathtaking," and
that's no exaggeration. What's on the table here is not just the most
wide-ranging surveillance capabilities in communications history, but
also a fundamental attack on liberty itself.
Among the most important things to understand about this proposal is
its back-door attack on encryption, the technology that lets you
communicate without snoops, public or private, capturing everything
you say. This question was settled, we thought, years ago -- with the
value of encryption plainly overriding the problems it creates for
law enforcement.
But that was before people really started using the Net to
communicate in more traditional ways, such as with Voice over IP.
VoIP is just an application that converts analog voice to digital
data, which then gets sent in little packages over various routes to
its destination, where the packets are reassembled and converted back
to analog voice. Now it's relatively simple to make such calls
secure: add an encryption layer. This is what at least one VoIP
provider does now, and if mine doesn't start doing it soon I'll
consider switching services.
The government can't "tap" those calls unless it can decrypt the
data. And if it demands the right to be able to do this, then
encryption itself is dead for you and me. If we have to hand over our
keys to the government, liberty itself will take another hit.
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