Though the administration is also on the verge of getting broad powers to destroy the entire Internet on national security grounds, President Obama is also seeking Congressional approval for a bill that would grant him virtually limitless power to wiretap online communications as well.
The The emphasis for many analysts is the impact of allowing the government broad wiretap powers over websites like Facebook, but the ability of sites to comply with the decryption requirement might be even more interesting than the former.
Indeed virtually any form of Internet communication can have virtually unbreakable encryption shoehorned onto it after the fact, and depending on the wording of this pending legislation it might have the effect of forcing service providers to ban all direct communication and scan all messages for even the theoretical appearance of encrypted data.
Also at issue is the Obama Administration’s ability to force foreign companies to comply with these new regulations. which would likely have to come with the threat of blocking American users from accessing foreign services whose communication is too free and too secure to comply with the new laws.
Land of the Free – yeah sure. Sinking ever closer to a fascist police state ought to make the Tea Party crowd giddy with glee but it's just another step in the decline of the short-run American empire. I won't laugh too much from North of the 49th as our squatter in the PM office loves to copy all the failed policies of the United States so it won't be long before they try adopting the same nonsense here – hopefully Canadians are more ready to battle for their freedoms than our American cousins.
Perhaps it is time for freedom and liberty respecting peoples to communicate in ways that Nazis can not intercept.
Download GPG while it's still legal:
http://www.gnupg.org/
If ISPs stop carrying encoded messages, the ‘net will lose a lot of utility. No banking, bill paying, shopping, yadadadada. But I guess the big ISPs will offer a platinum account, where encoding is allowed, but under their rules. They issue/change your key, and send a copy to the good ol’ NSA when they do. The end user won’t even know a 3rd party is on the line, till he hears jackboots in the hall at 3 a.m.
A guy in my town got drunk the other day and fell; he broke his leg in 3 places. I think the Federal Gumment ought to protect us from that kind of thing, too. What if that was you or me? I’m still not safe enough.
More here:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/09/27/encryptio…
“We're talking about lawfully authorized intercepts,” Valerie E. Caproni, general counsel for the FBI, told The New York Times.
ROFL!
*The measure is sure to stoke fierce opposition among business leaders, security experts and civil liberties advocates. They argue that the backdoors may have vulnerabilities that can allow hackers to illegally intercept protected communications. Indeed, something similar to that occurred in 2006 when hackers took advantage of legally mandated wiretap functions in Greece to spy on top government officials, including the prime minister."
They never know enough about you but there is hell to pay if you want them to be transparent.
Forget about a few strangely dressed crackpot terrorists who live primitively in dirty caves destroying our god-given right to communicate freely without fear, the real terrorists we need to fear are sophisticated cosmopolitans who wear pin-striped suits and live and work in Washington and on Wall Street. To defeat evil, one must know who their real enemies really are.
To paraphrase Pogo; "we have met the enemy and it's our own government."
Had enough, people?
Always blaming the "Fascist? – has anyone on these sites ever hear of MARXIST SOVIET COMMUNIST ?
In fact, the Fascist and National Socialist citizenry had much more personal freedom.
Look, we've got to go through security to go into our local Superior Court. The government fears the people: Period. And well it should. The whole premiss behind the Constitution is the people's fear of the government. We've let it get out and what's it gotten us?. Older government buildings wern't designed with that government fear in them. You've seen that.
The Founders had their "letters of correspondence". A form of the pony express would take news from town to town. They had to coordinate to fight the Revolution. Internet? As far governments concerned it was conceived in hell. As far as we're concerned, it's our escape from the hell their creating.
A completely unworkable restriction. Would the anti-encryption algorithms recognize foreign languages? How about multiple languages interleaved? How about handwritten messages in foreign languages passed as images?A few moments of enlightened reflection will undoubtedly produce a plethora of ways to send messages that idiot govvies can't read that would get through the gateways.
…and then, of course, there's always the case where an urgent message is diverted and a follow-on lawsuit as a result of the consequences. Will Congress exempt such situations? How about when they send messages? Are members of Congress exempt? How about Police departments?
…aargh…
It is time to dis-intermediate by using the snail mail and avoiding television..
They can intercept snail mail though too, agree about turning off the tube.