Big Brother Wants Into VoIP At Any Cost

wallaby fly-half writes "An amendment to the CALEA law would make it easier for the government to monitor calls made over VoIP and even temporarily store some packet traffic. Ars Technica reports that the 'bill will put the technology in place to buffer packet streams, and places the job of filtering those streams under government control. We know from the NSA warrantless wiretapping program that the government is not limiting itself to access to under court orders, and the CALEA bill must be considered in light of the capacity it generates.'"

Comments

Re:The New Bolshevism

[Tackhead]

> We can safely assume that the lion's share of our empire's surveillance, terrorism, goes unreported; and that the most insidious state must hide from its citizens. Haven't we learned any lessons from the hideous Bolsheviks?

Of course we have! Who do you think's been testing it for us all these years?

The USSR was the alpha test site. We learned that it doesn't work too well in a pen-and-paper world; you end up with something like East Germany's STASI, in which your economy implodes because a third of your population is busy filing reports on the other two thirds of your population... but nobody can actually find the reports to use them for anything.

China is the beta test site. A technologically-advanced state, a mixed economy, and strict information controls. Data storage is too expensive to store everyone's everything, so if you search for something naughty, it just gets blocked. Citizens quickly learn how to circumvent the censorship and/or the logging.

With what we've learned, we're ready to go to full implementation. Search for whatever you like. Talk about whatever you like. Everything gets delivered to you, you're never aware that you've crossed the line until... hang on a sec. There's a knock at my door.

Should this come to pass...

[Apocalypse111]

then I will be setting up a script to make VOIP calls into Saudi Arabia and Iraq at 4am every morning, and have a text-to-speech program start reading off an Arabic or Farsi translation of Dr. Seuss. Let the NSA have fun with that one, 'cause I know I will.