[FYI] Will FBI Decide Internet Configuration?

["Axel H Horns" <axel.h.horns@gmx.net>]

<http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/010128.sht
ml>

March 16, 2004

Will FBI Decide Internet Configuration?

• posted by Dan Gillmor 08:56 AM
• permanent link to this item

# 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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