Here We Go Again: FBI Wants Backdoors To Snoop On Nearly All Internet Communications

from the sure,-they-want-it... dept

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On Friday, Declan McCullagh over at News.com had the latest reports of the FBI trying to get new laws in place that would require all kinds of internet communication services to include wiretapping back doors , so that law enforcement could tap into them. This isn't a new idea. The FBI has been calling for this for a long, long time. We had mentioned it just last year , but it goes back much further than that. Basically, the FBI is upset that it can't easily tap certain popular VoIP and social networking communication tools. So it wants to effectively force the tech industry to build back doors into pretty much everything.It's understandablethe government would want this, but that doesn't mean it makes very much sense. First of all, there willbe ways around such taps, and you can bet that major criminals/terrorists are already figuring out how to use systems that are much more protected. Second, as soon as you open up such backdoors, you have pretty much guaranteed that they're going to be abused. Those with nefarious intent will figure out how to access them as well, and people using these systems will be much more at risk, not just of governments spying on their conversations. Second, it's really an impossible task. All that will happen is more alternatives, which will be decentralized and encrypted end-to-end with no possibility of back doors, will likely pop up. The end result won't make it any easier for the FBI to track down real criminals, but will put plenty of non-criminals at risk. Oh, and it will do this while making things much more expensive for any tech company that wants to let its users communicate. That doesn't seem particularly helpful.

Filed Under: encryption, fbi, voip, wiretapping