The New York Times is running a piece that shines a spotlight on new legislation from the FBI and CIA aimed at enabling federal law enforcement and national security agencies to listen in on encrypted online communications. They’re basically asking Congress to enact a law that would force companies that facilitate private online discussions – Facebook, BlackBerry, and Skype included – to modify their platforms in such a way that they would be able to comply in the event of a wiretap subpoena from federal authorities.
If this isn’t a violation of the basic rights of a United States citizen, then I don’t know what is. One can only hope that Congress has a shred of sanity left when considering the repercussions of allowing a proposal as dangerous as this to become law.
My fear is that so many of our nations legislators are not “internet savvy”, if you like. They most likely don’t have any idea how to reasonably and fairly treat this, or any other online issue.(I’m looking at you Net Neutrality) The result might be them giving total control to some agency/company, just so they don’t have to figure it out.
Dear Christ, the Patriot Act is like a weed that just keeps spreading. You may as well just burn up the constitution at this point. It’s not like legislators do anything but disregard it anymore.
I blame the baby boomers’ refusal to understand the internet and young people in general.
I think its naive to assume they dont already do this. Most likely the truth is that they have been doing this since they realized its value, prob in the 90′s, but it wasnt publicly known or legal. Now it seems someone realized its value again and is most definitely a step in the direction of the 1984 social slave. Who the fuck wants to use the internet after that? I still would, but I would learn rather quickly how to use it anonymously. It makes sense that they want to monitor the internet for illegal behavior but it seems one step closer to analyzing your thoughts and prosecuting you for the type of person you are. Here come the witch hunts again! It feels like our humanity is being taken away from us one bill after the next. Give us some fucking freedom you fascists!
I don’t know about you guys but if someone comes to my house to take me away for something I said or did on the internet they had better be bulletproof.
The idea of monitoring conversations online wouldn’t actually bother me, provided that any law enforcement agency who wanted to “tap” an internet conversation had to first get a court order for the tap based on existing evidence like how tapping phones works (in theory) at the moment.
I can’t see how they can mandate that websites *must* be able to intercept and decrypt messages, though.
Easy. Just don’t use FB or Skype. Problem solved. Although internet traffic routinely touches servers on American soil and then once its inside the border I suppose its all ‘tapable’.
Here’s an update to the status of that bill.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/09/victory-internet-censorship-bill-delayed