[Infowarrior] - How The FBI's Desire To Wiretap Every New Technology Makes Us Less Safe

[Richard Forno]

How The FBI's Desire To Wiretap Every New Technology Makes Us Less Safe

from the can-you-hear-me-now? dept

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130114/20442421683/how-fbis-desire-to-wiretap-every-new-technology-makes-us-less-safe.shtml

Here they go again. Every year or so we end up writing about the FBI's desire for better wiretapping capabilities for new technologies, such as Skype. Basically, the FBI argues that because "bad guys" might use those tools to communicate in secret, they need backdoors to make sure that they can keep tabs on the bad guys. 

But they're forgetting something: the FBI isn't necessarily the only one who will get access to those backdoors.  In fact, by requiring backdoors to enable surveillance on all sorts of systems, the FBI is almost guaranteeing that the bad guys will use those backdoors for their own nefarious purposes. It's not security, it's anti-security. 

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Think this could only happen abroad? Some years ago, the U.S. National Security Agency discovered that every telephone switch for sale to the Department of Defense had security vulnerabilities in their mandated wiretap implementations. Every. Single. One.

Somehow, the FBI always thinks that if there are backdoors, only it will use them. That is extreme wishful thinking.


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Just because i'm near the punchbowl doesn't mean I'm also drinking from it.