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IETF Rejects Wiretapping
Declan McCullagh of Wired covered the IETF meeting last night, and his report notes that the IETF rejected creating any sort of wiretapping standard. However, the companies who build routers and similar networking fundamentals stated that they would still move ahead with implementing tap-ability into their equipment - so the IETF action is a hollow victory, your internet communications will still be easily tappable.
"I'm a little concerned about [this anti-wiretap sentiment]. Clearly not all wiretapping is illegitimate," one Cisco engineer said.
Herein lies the problem. As long as people can see one use for something, all the adverse effects become secondary. Some criminals are caught by wiretaps, so everyone should be tappable.
This may be a specious argument, but if you nuke a city (say, Seattle), then you'll kill millions of innocent people. But it's okay, because you'll get some criminals, who'll never mug an old lady again.
It seems to me that the vendors who decided to continue with plans to make their equipment tapable are voluntarily taking part in a very strange experiment.
The way I see it, since there will very clearly be other vendors who do not insert taping abilities into their equipment, the ones that do are going to find out just how important an issue this is to the people who buy their equipment.
Most IT people I know have a thing about civil liberties, and I suspect that those companies that put backdoors into their products are going to get hurt in the marketplace because of their decisions (as long are there are alternatives to their products). It will be very interesting to see if the people who buy the network equipment will be willing to put up with a back door, or if they will simply find ways around it (the most obvious of which is to simply not buy the goods with the back doors built in).
Let the experiment begin...
Impossible = A fun challenge
This is just plain _wrong_. Does anyone else have flashbacks to big brother, or is it just me? Why would a private organization have _any_ responsibility to the FBI to make things "easily tappable". If it's easy for them, is it easy for any 'ol hacker to as well? Just telnet in, "come get your 0day logs here!"
This sort of thing in private industry makes me just plain sick to my stomach - I'm not an american, but I worry because this nuttiness finds it's way north of the border sooner or later. I thought america was supposed to be the land of the free, yet as an outside observer I see your rights getting quickly taken away in the name of either a drug-free (even your politicians smoke dope!) or protecting children (duh, that's what parents are for).
For example, in Canada, almost _no_ organization will require drug testing for engineering work - yet this is the opposite case in the US. Perhaps when they start looking for DNA samples, protests will start?
Federal screwing with the internet has to stop. Making the internet easy for the feds probably will make it possible for any MORON to play with your router logs.
Answer with your wallet - don't buy hardware that supports features like this. Until people stand up, you'll continue to get walked over. But why worry, you have nothing to hide, right?
Instead, buy hardware that supports idiot-friendly secure encryption, and I don't mean 48 bit DES, either. If the net is encrypted, who gives a flying @#$@# who's listening. They can get a court order to make you turn over your keys - just like they can do for your house.
Kudos..
..don't panic