Coming soon, more federal domestic surveillance...

[Raoul]

WASHINGTON — Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark†as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.

Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct “peer to peer†messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages.

The bill, which the Obama administration plans to submit to lawmakers next year, raises fresh questions about how to balance security needs with protecting privacy and fostering innovation. And because security services around the world face the same problem, it could set an example that is copied globally. (continued)

Edited September 28, 2010 by Raoul

[Guest HvyMtl]

Love how they claim it is not an extension of their police powers, but merely supporting existing ones...

Yeah. Right. Ever since that awful so-called "Patriot" Act, its been going down hill faster and faster...

[analog_kidd]

As soon as it gets enacted, an open source option will appear that will not be under control of the Feds. Bad guys will just use that option, leaving us law abiding citizens the ones who will be spied on.

[lowbud]

You'll be supprised how much of this is already in place. All the big service providers already log everything and it only takes a few hours to get a court order to release those logs. This includes email and IM's from hotmail, yahoo, google, and all the other larger hosting providers out there. Absolutly nothing is private and it's been that way for years. They just want to make it easier to view in real time.

[Guest 6.8 AR]

You'll be supprised how much of this is already in place. All the big service providers already log everything and it only takes a few hours to get a court order to release those logs. This includes email and IM's from hotmail, yahoo, google, and all the other larger hosting providers out there. Absolutly nothing is private and it's been that way for years. They just want to make it easier to view in real time.

But a court order is staying within the bounds of the law, rather than having

carte blanche with anything, isn't it?

Get a load of groups like "Free Press" if you want a scare. Oh yeh, I forgot. Sorry.

Some of you actually think "Net Neutrality is an equality thing. All this ties together

in ways that aren't very good for free speech and privacy. This present government

could care less about that. It wants absolute control.

[Guest 6.8 AR]

Liberty and security go hand in hand. More liberty means less security to some

and the opposite to others. When the government provides cradle to grave health care

and morsels of food for everyone and lessons on how to sing "Kumbaya", it costs

someone, and you know who. You give up your freedom when you demand security,

health care and whatever else you expect from the government. That equates to

power being taken by the government from "We, the people".

The Constitution spells out the powers granted to the government, and it should be

nothing more than that, actually several amendments should be repealed to restored

to get this country back to normal. Instead of rationalizing away these usurpations,

some might consider the premise which these laws are based. There is nothing good

at all that will come from laws like this except tyranny. history proves it, time and time

again. Wake up people, unless you want to live in a world that controls everything

you do. It's happened before and it is being attempted again, right in front of a bunch

of sheep.

[JayC]

You'll be supprised how much of this is already in place. All the big service providers already log everything and it only takes a few hours to get a court order to release those logs. This includes email and IM's from hotmail, yahoo, google, and all the other larger hosting providers out there. Absolutly nothing is private and it's been that way for years. They just want to make it easier to view in real time.

Doesn't even take a court order... Thanks to the patriot act the FBI agent can just right their own search warrant called a National Security Letter (NSL) to get the information without the wasted time of finding a judge to rubber stamp the order.

There is however a lot of information which is private today, and creating backdoors into the encryption will not be a good thing for us the citizens.

[JayC]

Liberty and security go hand in hand. More liberty means less security to some

and the opposite to others. When the government provides cradle to grave health care

and morsels of food for everyone and lessons on how to sing "Kumbaya", it costs

someone, and you know who. You give up your freedom when you demand security,

health care and whatever else you expect from the government. That equates to

power being taken by the government from "We, the people".

The Constitution spells out the powers granted to the government, and it should be

nothing more than that, actually several amendments should be repealed to restored

to get this country back to normal. Instead of rationalizing away these usurpations,

some might consider the premise which these laws are based. There is nothing good

at all that will come from laws like this except tyranny. history proves it, time and time

again. Wake up people, unless you want to live in a world that controls everything

you do. It's happened before and it is being attempted again, right in front of a bunch

of sheep.

Liberty and the illusion of security go hand in hand....

There fixed that for you... giving up liberty never leads to more security... nothing we've done since 9/11 that reduced our liberty has given us any additional security.

[Guest Glock23ForMe]

Honestly, they're not going to read every email, IM, message, etc... All they are going to do, is have a program that searches these and a computer is going to do a FIND function that is looking for some types of words... (Ever seen the Bourne Movie, the one about BlackBriar?)

It's already happening.. They're just going to make it so everyone knows about it now, so they can pay the people that work for that dept less $$$.

[JayC]

Honestly, they're not going to read every email, IM, message, etc... All they are going to do, is have a program that searches these and a computer is going to do a FIND function that is looking for some types of words... (Ever seen the Bourne Movie, the one about BlackBriar?)

It's already happening.. They're just going to make it so everyone knows about it now, so they can pay the people that work for that dept less $$$.

It already happening for emails and im's etc that cross the Internet in clear text... Echelon (signals intelligence) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It currently is not happening to encrypted traffic... that's why the Government wants to force companies to install a backdoor to get access to the clear text.

This is a huge step in the wrong direction for this country... we don't need a government that can spy on our most private communications without our knowledge... no good comes from the ability to do that.

[Guest Lester Weevils]

I wonder how long it will be before using non-crippled encryption schemes will be illegal or evidence of criminal intent. The USA hardly has a lock on programming talent, and encryption schemes written in other parts of the world are not subject to US local law regardless of what the US law happens to be.

It would be like if you put personal documents in a safe, you must have criminal intent, or why else would you lock em up?

[JayC]

I wonder how long it will be before using non-crippled encryption schemes will be illegal or evidence of criminal intent. The USA hardly has a lock on programming talent, and encryption schemes written in other parts of the world are not subject to US local law regardless of what the US law happens to be.

It would be like if you put personal documents in a safe, you must have criminal intent, or why else would you lock em up?

It's not programming talent that is needed... or at least not only programming talent... mathematics talent is much more important.... writing secure encryption code to replace such programs isn't not a small feat and to do so without accidentally allowing the system to be compromised... Then you have to get everybody you know to use the program instead of the stuff they're using today.

Even if our government could be trusted (which it can't) other governments and terrorist groups will use these back doors to do very bad things to their populations... just look at recent attacks by Chinese hackers into Google 'backdoor' for the federal government which allowed them to identify, and jail dissidents. It's not a matter of whether you think you can trust the US government... the question is can you trust every 14 year old hacker out there...

[Guest Lester Weevils]

It's not programming talent that is needed... or at least not only programming talent... mathematics talent is much more important.... writing secure encryption code to replace such programs isn't not a small feat and to do so without accidentally allowing the system to be compromised... Then you have to get everybody you know to use the program instead of the stuff they're using today.

Even if our government could be trusted (which it can't) other governments and terrorist groups will use these back doors to do very bad things to their populations... just look at recent attacks by Chinese hackers into Google 'backdoor' for the federal government which allowed them to identify, and jail dissidents. It's not a matter of whether you think you can trust the US government... the question is can you trust every 14 year old hacker out there...

It doesn't matter if a lot of people use a particular encryption scheme, IMO. A bigger market might just make a bigger target for busting the scheme.

Though public/private key schemes with long keys are pretty difficult to brute-force break unless you have some kind of inside info beyond knowledge of the algorithm. Until we get quantum computers anyway. But if everybody has quantum computers on their desk, the encryption could get orders of magnitude stiffer, so that advantage would only last as long as quantum computers would remain so expensive that only govts can afford to own them.

[Guest Glock23ForMe]

It currently is not happening to encrypted traffic...

As Far As We Know.....

If someone knows how to do it... Someone else knows how to "un-do" it...

Which, is why I said...

They're just going to make it so everyone knows about it now, so they can pay the people that work for that dept less $$$.

[Guest Glock23ForMe]

Food For Thought:

The Internet is about as safe as a convenience store in East LA on Saturday night.

—Jonathan Littman

[JayC]

Glock,

Either the NSA already has backdoors or 'tricks' to break common encryption algorithms or they don't... My guess is that in some cases they do and in some cases they don't...

The issue here is computing power... if you have to decode, even with a reasonable efficient back door, you still run into problems with having enough computing cycles to process the data in real time or near real time.

So, as a general rule, even modest encryption is enough to prevent on the fly monitoring by a system like 'echelon'... just decoding tcp/ip packets at the speeds we're talking about is a fairly difficult task.

As to your opinion that if somebody knows how to encrypt it, somebody knows how to decrypt it... that's just not true... one time pads work very well even in today's massive super computers... unless there is a flaw in the algorithm... true PKI (public/private key encryption) is very hard to attack...

As Far As We Know.....

If someone knows how to do it... Someone else knows how to "un-do" it...

Which, is why I said...

[JayC]

It doesn't matter if a lot of people use a particular encryption scheme, IMO. A bigger market might just make a bigger target for busting the scheme.

Though public/private key schemes with long keys are pretty difficult to brute-force break unless you have some kind of inside info beyond knowledge of the algorithm. Until we get quantum computers anyway. But if everybody has quantum computers on their desk, the encryption could get orders of magnitude stiffer, so that advantage would only last as long as quantum computers would remain so expensive that only govts can afford to own them.

Virtually no programs on the market today use public/private key encryption for the entire length of the communications path. Most programs only use public/private keys to exchange a 'pseudo random' symmetrical key of a much lower strength.... and generally much easier to attack.

PGP is an example where the public/private key doesn't protect the entire message only a much lower strength symmetrical encryption key (normally AES, RSA, or Twofish)... attack the symmetrical part and you have no need to bother attacking the much harder public/private key.

[Guest CrazyLincoln]

A) These proposals only create problems for those who must be compliant and do not stop those who they are trying to stop.

Not allowing me to encrypt files with my own virtually unbreakable encryption violates the first amendment. Just because no one else understands the random strings of bytes does not make it non-speech. I can make an art piece which no one but me understands and it would still be first amendment material.

C) This additionally violates the 4th Amendment. I am not required to give a key to my front door to the local sheriff "in case" they need to execute a search warrant. Why should they use "crackable" encryption "in case" they need to execute a wiretap?