The title says it all: more at link FBI Wants Backdoors in Facebook, Skype and Instant Messaging The FBI has been lobbying top internet companies like Yahoo and Google to support a proposal that would force them to provide backdoors for government surveillance, according to CNET. The Bureau has been quietly meeting with representatives of these companies, as well as Microsoft (which owns Hotmail and Skype), Facebook and others to argue for a legislative proposal, drafted by the FBI, that would require social-networking sites and VoIP, instant messaging and e-mail providers to alter their code to make their products wiretap-friendly. I foresee crypto wars 2.0 I've already started encrypting my IM chats as a matter of course.
It will backfire. The internet is an open protocol. All you & I have to do is to agree on the port to use (65,536 available) and we can send encrypted packets directly to each other. If the feds start pulling this crap, we will see the social network & IM equivalents of peer-to-peer networking. I believe there is one project already underway based in the Netherlands to develop social networking functionality along those lines. Sometimes these bozos seem to forget that the internet as originally designed (ARPANET) was a military network capable of reconstructing itself as individual nodes found one another.
I hear ya, but I think we'll probably end up needing to do the equivalents of peer-to-peer. They're going to push hard on this as they did the first time with CALEA. And we lost that one. My feeling about social networks is that they're a 'power to the people' kind of thing, and if we want them, and to not be surveilled to within inches of our lives when we use them, we'll have to build our own.
Glenn Greenwald is also writing about it: Surveillance State democracy As the FBI seeks full access to all forms of Internet communication, it is not voters who need to be convinced BY GLENN GREENWALD
