Obama Wants Broader Internet Wiretap Authority

An anonymous reader writes "The White House plans to deliver a bill to Congress next year that will require Internet-based communication services that use encryption to be capable of decrypting messages to comply with federal wiretap orders. The bill will go beyond CALEA to apply to services such as Blackberry email. Even though RIM has stated that it does not currently have an ability to decrypt messages via a master key or back door, the bill may require them to. Regarding this development, James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology commented on the proposal, saying, 'They basically want to turn back the clock and make Internet services function the way that the telephone system used to function.'"

Comments

Bad timing.

[elucido]

Just a few days ago they raid the anti war movement and now right before the election they want to discuss this? This is a politically stupid time to talk about broader wiretap authority!

Re:Bad timing.

[CarpetShark]

Seriously? The average voter has NO clue about stuff like this. In fact, they'll probably vote FOR it, if someone calls it anti-terrorist.

Re:Bad timing.

[Anonymous Coward]

It warms my heart to all these comments. I'm glad I'm not the only one who realizes that Americans (us) are fat, sloppy and feeble minded. If we have time, we might glance at a ballot and pencil in the oval next to the name we've seen the most on the national news (all of which spin the news to fit their own political bent). Our rights and freedoms are being swallowed right and left in a beautiful, bi-partisan orchestration, of elected (read: purchased) officials who believe more laws are better.

We need smaller government.

Re:Bad timing.

[CrazyDuke]

Really, who are you going to vote for? Who do you think gave this government the ability to abuse it's power indiscriminately? Who do you think gave the prior government it's abusive power? Who do you think this government will give it's power to?

Vote any way you want. You'll still get basically the same result, just different posturing.

Re:Bad timing.

[ArcherB]

Republican politicians advocate smaller government...except when it comes to invading your personal life.

Actually, conservatives, not necessarily "Republicans" simply want the federal government to follow the Constitution, limited by the 10th Amendment. That means less government when dealing with stuff like farm subsidies and corporate bailouts, and could mean more government with things specifically spelled out in the Constitution, like national security.

Anything not spelled out in the Constitution as a federal government power is a power belonging to the states... period!

Re:Bad timing.

[IndustrialComplex]

Wasn't the previous slashdot post about "Man gets 10 years for VOIP hacking [slashdot.org]" ? But when the gov does it it's all dandy and fine and necessary and indeed obligatory ?!?

In our current environment, it is fine and dandy.

That is the danger of ignoring the Constitution for things that just happen to jive with your goals, and then getting upset when someone else ignores the constitution for something you oppose.

It's why a liberal or elastic interpretation of our Constitution is a damned dangerous thing. Not because any individual goal is wrong, but our Constitution simply breaks down when you allow it to be interpreted in a flexible manner. It simply wasn't designed to be able to withstand such interpretations. The result is a bit like cutting a hole through a fence that surrounds your yard. It certainly makes it easier for you to go in and out, but it also means that you lose control over who else will use that hole.

The limitations on power in our Constitution simply fail if it is interpreted as a flexible document. Power should only be granted in very specific and limited ways. Especially when you are granting it to an entity that claims to be sovereign and universal.

Re:Bad timing.

[jbeaupre]

Is it too late to bring back the Whig party? That's meant as a joke, but for those of you who may not have heard of them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_Party_(United_States)

Re:Bad timing.

[BobMcD]

You don't want smaller government, you want to fragment the USA.

Well, dear Coward, you seem to have overlooked a simple fact: the USA is fragmented.

In fact, it was designed that way. Brilliantly so, I might add. We're the land of the free, with freedom of speech and freedom of religion. How on earth would it be possible to bring together people from all cultures and allow them to coexist without fragmentation? Are we really to decide on a single religion/race/etc, to avoid fragmentation of culture? That's fascism. And yet if we don't how are we to dictate that the minor variations in culture that occur must all adhere to the same rigid standards? Impossible, without simply playing to the majority, and allowing two wolves and a sheep to vote on dinner.

No, the very tenets of freedom are around 'live and let live'. The notion of one all-powerful authority at the whims of a two-headed-dog is rather the opposite of what we were founded to be. The Second Amendment is supposed to safeguard against this kind of a monopoly occurring, as it provides us with the right of rebellion. Or at the very least, the threat of it.

And while I do realize that the 'war to free the slaves' has trampled on that part of the Constitution, bear in mind that there aren't any slaves today. The price for that conflict has long-since been paid, and I think it's high time the local people got their power back, thanks.

The order of the boxes is thus: soap, ballot, ammo.

Welcome to America.

Re:Bad timing.

[notNeilCasey]

...or to the people. There's a comma, not a period :)

The more things 'Change'...

[Anonymous Coward]

the more they stay the same (or get worse).

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[stoat]

At least they are trying to make it legal. I'm sure the TURRISTS won't just use standalone encryption.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[EaglemanBSA]

FTF (NYT) A:

No one should be promising their customers that they will thumb their nose at a U.S. court order," Ms. Caproni said. "They can promise strong encryption. They just need to figure out how they can provide us plain text.

What hey're trying to legalize is rather heinous on the part of our government. Just because it's been made legal doesn't mean it's right or good. Seriously, between the ability to declare even American citizens terrorists because of what they've said (not necessarily what they've done), the ability to try anyone classified as a terrorist outside a civilian court, and now the "needed" capability to decrypt encrypted messages over the internet...what's to stop whoever is in the White House from 'disappearing' outspoken people they disagree with, without breaking the law?

I'm an American, and I value my freedom over a false sense of security. If you aren't comfortable with that, perhaps America isn't for you.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[martas]

plus, as an added goodie, this will create a vulnerability in all compliant encrypted internet services - now a hacker just has to figure out one master key to break the security of the service. and, once that happens, the service provider will have to incur the probably huge cost of switching to a new master key.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[commodore64_love]

Put another way:

If you outlaw guns.... I mean secure keyless encryption, then only the criminals will have encrypted messages. (And the rest of us will be defenseless sheep.)

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[martas]

I'm an American, and I value my freedom over a false sense of security. If you aren't comfortable with that, perhaps America isn't for you.

Given recent trends, I'd say the opposite - since you value your freedom over a false sense of security, perhaps America isn't for you.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[L4t3r4lu5]

Never! There's no precedent for this.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[mark72005]

The point you're missing is that the Obama administraiton is more worried about potential "domestic terrorists", i.e., people whose political ideology varies most widely with their own, than they are about international terrorists.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[Crudely_Indecent]

They just need to figure out how they can provide us plain text.

What they're trying to legalize is rather heinous...

I'd call it ridiculous.

When I read the Caproni quote, I hear: "US Intelligence services aren't intelligent enough to figure this stuff out. You need to do the work for us and spell it out in big block letters. We need it to be as clear as purple crayon."

So, now might be a good time to really promote PGP and teach people to use it. If the service providers aren't providing the encryption service, they cannot provide the plain text. Anyone who is sufficiently concerned about their privacy can take responsibility for it.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[EaglemanBSA]

Well, if it's the last piece of the pie, it's not much of a 'slippery slope' argument, now is it? In quite a real sense, we'd be giving the power to decrypt general internet communications to people who have a LOT to gain by using it against their political opponents.

Seriously, this has little use except to spy on the general public, while proposing encryption law that has been suggested and shot down in the past (think Clipper Chips?). It makes corporate/private encryption weaker, the entirety of our internet communications more vulnerable to attack, and could quite possibly restrict our ability, in the future, (yes, slippery slope) to encrypt our own data, as has already been done in the UK. This essentially serves all internet communications providers with the same order as the UK served their entire citizenry: you encrypt something, you have to give us the keys to decrypt it.

Hope that satisfied you logically.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[Anonymous Coward]

>>>I value my freedom over a false sense of security. If you aren't comfortable with that, perhaps America isn't for you.

"Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety [until the next tyrant comes along and uses his power to imprison you] deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." - Benjamin Franklin

Way to take that WAY out-of-context.

Franklin was referring to settlers who refused to use firearms to defend themselves from raids by French-allied native tribes during the French and Indian War (US name)/Seven-Year's War (IIRC the European name).

That quote is nothing more than part of an anti-pacifism rant. Given that Franklin would later be a leader of an armed rebellion, it's not surprising he vehemently disagreed with the philosophy unarmed pacifists.

Besides that, you're misusing the quote anyway. Franklin's "essential liberty" was the keeping and bearing of arms by individuals. The "temporary safety" was the settler's false hope that by being unarmed they wouldn't be attacked. Franklin was not referring to tyrants or governments relationship to their own citizens - he was referring to isolated individuals' self-defense ability/responsibility during a war.

The fact that your two-hundred-fifty-year-old completely out-of-context sound bite get modded +5 is more a reflection of the ignorance of the moderators than anything else.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[TheRaven64]

The difference between guns and encryption is that a modern economy can function without guns (at least on the inside), while it can't function without encryption. Banks could not work without secure communication, no trade secrets could be kept, and so on. If you mandate that every form of encryption must have a government back door, then you are making it easy for an underpaid civil servant (or someone who blackmails a civil servant) to cause massive damage to the economy and make a large profit in the process. You also have the problem that it can't possibly work. You can get secure encryption software from a variety of sources, including some textbooks that include code listings.

The end result is that terrorists and other people who actually understand cryptography (at least, in broad terms) will use secure encryption, while the average person using Internet Banking won't.

Re:Meet the new boss, same as the old boss

[BobMcD]

The fact that your two-hundred-fifty-year-old completely out-of-context sound bite get modded +5 is more a reflection of the ignorance of the moderators than anything else.

To put that into context, dear Coward, are you purporting that Franklin would disagree with the use of his quote in this manner?

Are you in fact saying that he held the right to bear arms, ONLY, as essential? Because I'm just not seeing him turning over in his grave over this one. In fact, I'm not even willing to get on board and say that this is out of context, because the concept applies equally well.

You're essentially saying that "don't hit your brother" is WAY DIFFERENT than "don't hit your cousin", and I, for one, disagree.

Technically Not Just Obama

[eldavojohn]

While they're submitting the new legislation next year, a congressional hearing recently heard arguments in favor of this and the original NYTimes article notes that it's:

Federal law enforcement and national security officials are preparing to seek sweeping new regulations for the Internet, arguing that their ability to wiretap criminal and terrorism suspects is “going dark” as people increasingly communicate online instead of by telephone.

Of course, the New York Times article is way better than the Faux News article but my submission this morning turned into a paywall.

Bad, bad, very bad idea. Every academic says this is stupid, again from the original article:

Steven M. Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor, pointed to an episode in Greece: In 2005, it was discovered that hackers had taken advantage of a legally mandated wiretap function to spy on top officials’ phones, including the prime minister’s.

The government is trying to protect us by forcing us to be less secure and more vulnerable. That logic simply does not follow. I'm not against responsible internet wiretaps but this is the opposite of responsible.

Only it makes no difference.

[elucido]

The terrorists will develop their own encryption schemes so using wiretaps would be completely worthless anyway. The mafia is smart enough to outsmart this, street gangs are smart enough, terrorists are smart enough. This is to watch the civilian population like you and me.

Blackberry terrorists?

[Anonymous Coward]

What I don't get about all this Blackberry-encryption-fuss: if Terrorists really care about encrypting their communications, there are free tools on the interwebs that will let them do so. These tools can not in any way be breached by the government or the service provider. The fact that this is so, is also well-known.

Thus I am forced to conclude that any terrorist that understands the need for encryption, also understands the need for encryption that he himself has total control over, and thus would not be relying on RIM to secure his communications.

In conclusion: this will not prevent terrorists from communicating securely. Now, Obama, go back to your health care reform and struggling economy.

Re:It was only a matter of time.

[elucido]

To follow along similar path. Who is our government protecting us against?

The government protecting itself from people like you.

Natural tendency

[Anonymous Coward]

It is the natural tendency of political power to expand and consolidate over time. History has confirmed this over and over again. Like a mega-corporation hungry for more control over the market, government will keep pushing to expand their revenue and power over the people, like clockwork, year after year.

There's a reason why the elite at the top of the pyramid are swimming in wealth, and it's not because they're satisfied with the amount of control they have over the populace. Government is a business, and like any business, their primary objective is profit. The difference, of course, is that government holds the special right to generate market share through coercion, rather than persuasion.

Hahah

[AdmV0rl0n]

Hope. Was not that the so called banner from 'Democrats' during their endless waa waa about Bush. Not much needs to be said. Gitmo? Ha. Iraq? Ha. Afganistan, Ha.

Obama is gone after 4 years, and will be hated by both sides.

So

[Dunbal]

how is all this "Change" working out for you?

As if there were any doubt, HOPE is dead

[erroneus]

I, like so many others, had the audacity of hope that Obama was a good man and interested in a better America... a second coming of JFK. (Yeah, I know there are people who will say JFK was the anti-christ.) But, instead of his promised removal of Bush administrations attacks on our freedoms and privacy, he persisted in it and defended it. Some people said "but this is normal! He is probably reviewing it before he makes changes!" How about now? No? Illegal wiretapping program is still running. And now he wants MORE.

So, Obama and other players in government HATE our freedom and HATE our privacy and will stop at nothing until both are gone. They make claims of defending and protecting our freedoms while they take them away. They make claims of "terrorists" hating our freedoms, yet the only ones who are attacking them are our own government. ... and still no one cares. We are all too busy trying to figure out how and why we are all getting obese and getting diabetes to concern ourselves with where the government and big business is taking our country.

Re:As if there were any doubt, HOPE is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

"I, like so many others, had the audacity of hope that Obama was a good man and interested in a better America"

Why did you think this? Because he said so? Anybody with half a neuron saw through his bullshit. He is a lifelong professional politician. Professional politicians ONLY serve the Almighty State, not the people.

People like you have destroyed this nation. Gullible, useful idiots like you are more complicit in bringing about fascism than any ACTUAL fascist.

And many of us will never forget this.

Re:As if there were any doubt, HOPE is dead

[mangu]

I, like so many others, had the audacity of hope that Obama was a good man and interested in a better America... a second coming of JFK. (Yeah, I know there are people who will say JFK was the anti-christ.)

Politics is like that. The great advantage JFK has over others today is that he was assassinated. Had he not been killed, people would be criticizing him for escalating the US intervention in Vietnam, for starting/bungling the Bay of Pigs incident, for nearly triggering WWIII or for not going far enough in the Cuban missile crisis, and so on.

Re:As if there were any doubt, HOPE is dead

[elrous0]

Actually he *is* a lot like JFK. He's a vastly overrated politician who is ramping up the spying of the CIA/NSA, while being deified by a party that supposedly stands for civil liberties. He's also ambivalent on civil rights issues, sucks up to big corporations, is continuing an unwinnable war, and couldn't give a shit less about the plight of the common citizen. If he were any more like JFK, Marylin Monroe would blow him.

Re:As if there were any doubt, HOPE is dead

[osgeek]

I, like so many others, had the audacity of hope that Obama was a good man and interested in a better America..

The clues were all there before the election. You, "like so many others", just didn't want to listen. You wanted your rock star and you didn't care that he had no experience, ties to some pretty unsavory characters, and no real plusses besides that he was well spoken. The pass that the mainstream media gave him meant that you needed to seek out contrary opinions and journalists if you didn't want to make a poor decision.

Instead of looking for the next JFK next time, try for someone more straightforward and ethical. I don't care if he's from the left or right of the political spectrum, just elect someone who is smart and has a track record for fairness and following through on his/her campaign promises.

Re:As if there were any doubt, HOPE is dead

[Raenex]

I don't think it's so black and white. If he didn't care about the plight of the common citizen, why extend unemployment benefits? Why push for health care? If he loved big corporations so much, why did he try to publicly humiliate the Supreme Court justices for their ruling on corporate free speech? Whether Afghanistan is an unwinnable war or not is a matter of debate -- Iraq looked hopeless before the surge.

As for wiretapping, I won't defend him. This is just the Clipper Chip from the Clinton administration all over again. I wonder if any President ever pulled back from more invasive law enforcement.

Re:As if there were any doubt, HOPE is dead

[ptbarnett]

How do otherwise intelligent people put themselves into a political fantasy-land?

You avoid it by looking beyond the cheerleading from the mainstream media. Everyone like to bash Fox News (and justifiably so), but refuses to admit that CNN, (MS)NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, the NY Times, the Washington Post (and most others) do the same thing for the other side.

As another poster points out above, the clues were all there. Anyone with access to the Internet could see the warning signs. Even with Obama's extremely abbreviated voting record, you could see exactly what he would do -- and he hasn't strayed from that path.

Re:As if there were any doubt, HOPE is dead

[wytcld]

Everyone like to bash Fox News (and justifiably so), but refuses to admit that CNN, (MS)NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, the NY Times, the Washington Post (and most others) do the same thing for the other side.

You're aware that only from the Fox POV are CNN, (MS)NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, the NY Times, Washington Post on "the other side." Most of us on the continuum of the liberal-progressive-radical left see them as being 2/3rd Fox Lite establishment apologists, and 1/3 real reporting at best, with even that careful to avoid going outside of centrist consensus.

The only exceptions to that list are Rachel and Keith on MSNBC, but neither of them represents the farther reaches of the left. Neither is Noam Chomsky, by a long shot. Neither represents the far end of the spectrum the way Glenn and Bill do on Fox.

The difference between conservatives and liberals

[chill]

When (if?) conservatives say "the government should not have that power", what they mean is "the liberals currently in government should not have that power, but it is okay for our side".

When (if?) liberals say "the government should not have that power", what they mean is "the conservatives currently in government should not have that power, but it is okay for our side".

Both conveniently forget the problem of not whether YOU will not abuse the power when asking for it, but once granted whether or not those elected AFTER you are gone will abuse the power. For those playing at home, the answer is invariably "YES".

Not a single attack foiled...

[Darkness404]

If the white house and the rest of the government want to continue to litigate our freedoms away, the least they could do is show how these programs actually have caught real terrorists. Because, quite frankly if they can't even show that, they are eroding our rights away for nothing other than more control. There are several reasons why we haven't had a terrorist attack since 9/11 and none of those are thanks to the government.

A) Natural stupidity. Terrorists aren't exactly smart, remember the "times square bomber" who used as his detonation device.... firecrackers? Yeah, it takes planning to pull off an attack and quite honestly the terrorists don't have that ability.

B) Passengers in public transit. If you look like you are going to blow up or hijack a plane, the passengers will take you down. Ever since 9/11 people associate hijacking = run into a building rather than the pre-9/11 mindset of "do nothing, wind up in Cuba, get on a plane back home".

C) Terrorists aren't common. This idea that there are millions of terrorists trying to kill you all the time is laughable and has no basis in fact.

Granted, these laws are pure BS no matter how many "terrorists" they've caught, but if the government can't even show a single terrorist caught using these, and a real terrorist that could actually cause serious harm, the citizens should strike these laws down even faster.

CHANGE!!

[TrisexualPuppy]

Hey Obama, spare any change?

Oh, right, America's attention span is so low that they forgot that they were holding hands in a circle chanting all the slogans and catch-phrases spewed by his campaigners.

Meet the new boss
Same as the old boss
America, you'll get fooled again

As long as they have their Sunday Night Football, we won't have anything to worry about.

Re:CHANGE!!

[BobMcD]

This is what I get for not reading the article first. Faux News. Where's my salt lick?

This will cause me mod damage, but I'm going to dive in here one more time: numbski, don't be a jerkwad.

There are several other sources for this same story. And yet, you are going to deny that it is true because the single link above is from 'Faux News'.

Forget Google, logic, or even a mild interest in the actual article itself, it's FOX BASHING TIME. WHOOOAAAAHHHHH!

Partisanship is a disease of the mind, and it just made you do something stupid. Reflect on that.

Re:CHANGE!!

[fuscata]

According to everything I've read, this is *not* an attempt to achieve "broader Internet wiretap authority" but rather to force providers to put systems in place so that they can easily and quickly comply with *existing* authority. You can argue that the existing authority is overreaching, but that's a separate matter.

Re:CHANGE!!

[multi io]

According to everything I've read, this is *not* an attempt to achieve "broader Internet wiretap authority" but rather to force providers to put systems in place so that they can easily and quickly comply with *existing* authority. You can argue that the existing authority is overreaching, but that's a separate matter.

Except it doesn't work. The makers of this proposal don't understand that, contrary to the telephone system, encryption on the internet is implemented at the endpoints of a connection, not in the middle. It may well be that that reduces the government's ability to decrypt such communication, but the ISPs are the wrong party to address this bill to, because, generally speaking, they're not the ones who do the encryption. They're just the ones who deliver the bits. The people (the end users) are the ones who do the encryption, so they would be the right addressees for this law, and if this were implemented, it *would* amount to an "attempt to achieve broader wiretap authority" -- of truly Orwellian proportions.

Re:CHANGE!!

[FiloEleven]

I voted for Obama, and either he doesn't know what he's saying (very possible), or he's lost his mind.

These are really the only two options you see? That's pretty naive. Seems more likely to me that like every other president in the past few decades, he promised to do what sounded good to the most people to get in, and now he's doing whatever his handlers tell him to.

There's a Difference?

[Dragon Bait]

Both major parties want to invade your personal life:

• Democrats want you to smoke weed, but not tobacco (flip for Republicans)
• Democrats want to censure you from saying "hurtful" words, but want flag burning (flip for Repubs)
• Democrats want to control what you eat, no more fast food for you (I'm sure Repubs don't want you to eat something)
• Democrats don't want you to drink soda, but alcohol is a-okay (flip for Repubs).
• Democrats want you to speak out against the government [unless they're in power] (same for the Repubs)

The list can go on. Thinking that the Democrats are for personal freedom is outdated thinking. Both major parties are led by totalitarian control freaks.

Re:There's a Difference?

[FiloEleven]

The problem is the discrepancy between what the Tea Party claims as its official beliefs (small government, less taxes) and what the Tea Party actually believes (Obama is a Socialist Marxist fascist dictator who worships Hitler and Allah and wants to take all the rich people's money away and give it to all the poor people and sell us all out to the world government).

That isn't what the Tea Party movement actually believes. That is a minority viewpoint that is overplayed by the media to discredit the movement and neutralize its effectiveness. The conservative news outlets like Fox play up this caricature of the movement while the liberal news outlets use the provided caricature to tear it to shreds--it's kind of like a straw man, only behind the scenes it's the same oligarchy setting it up and tearing it down. The official beliefs are by and large what the Tea Party movement is actually about; you just don't get to see it because that isn't where the cameras are pointed.

I am in agreement with the stated goals of the Tea Party, but any group that has Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin as its unofficial spokespeople is not a group I would ever want to associate with.

Painting Glenn Beck as a Tea Party guy is a brilliant move by our plutocratic overlords. His popularity with the group, if I'm not mistaken, took off when he made a turnabout regarding Ron Paul, someone who really does represent Tea Party ideals--in fact, it was Ron Paul supporters who popularized modern-day tea parties. Fox latched on to and perverted the idea, using Beck and others to push their own agenda and to de-fang the movement from making any changes that would benefit average Americans over corporations and the political class.

Paul himself has said exactly what you did: that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin ought not to be spokesmen for the movement, and that people who listen to them are being taken for a ride.

Regardless, the damage is done and the Tea Party movement has very little respect. What may save the movement despite itself is the continued recession despite numerous bailouts. Word has it that Democrats are in trouble come November, and there are lots of Republican candidates running on the Tea Party staple of small government. The fierce primary election infighting between them and the more established Republicans gives me hope that the party may be forcefully reformed from the big-government warmongering monster it's become.

So the Arabs Can Spy on Us

[Doc Ruby]

The United Arab Emirates, followed by their huge cousin Saudi Arabia, are shutting down Blackberry until RIM lets them spy on its data in realtime. RIM has been able to argue it doesn't have such a backdoor feature. Obama has the clout to force this Canadian company to create one. And then the Saudis and the rest of their medieval tyranny neighbors will spy on us. They don't need no steenkin' warrants. And neither does Obama, if he personally decides it's a "state secret".