"U.S. Wants to Make It Easier to Wiretap the Internet"

[hummingwolf]

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.

After reading the entire article, I'm afraid my first reaction was, "Umm, good luck with that." Could be an interesting tech story to watch.

Comments

[aekiy.livejournal.com]

Apart from the general stupidity of the concept, particularly with regards to decryption, isn't this in conflict with the current labeling of the Internet as an information service rather than a telecommunications service?

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure law enforcement cares how the Internet is labeled--they just want to figure out how to tap somebody's phone line when they don't have a phone line.