FBI wants to wiretap Facebook and Google

Charlie Savage of the New York Times reports: "Essentially, officials want Congress to require all services that enable communications — including encrypted e-mail transmitters like BlackBerry, social networking Web sites like Facebook and software that allows direct peer to peer messaging like Skype — to be technically capable of complying if served with a wiretap order. The mandate would include being able to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages."

There are many problems associated with this idea. The FBI claims they lack the ability to intercept messages but the NSA already has that ability they claim to lack. The CIA also has these capabilities. They have Carnivore and deep packet inspection which can wiretap at the ISP level. The FBI wants to use this to go after criminals and terrorists but what you aren't told is that while most people aren't terrorists anyone is a potential criminal. There are so many federal laws that I challenge anybody to make a website listing every single federal offense.

Since we don't know all the federal laws and they aren't all listed in one place, we all have to assume we broke some esoteric federal law we may not have known about which justifies giving the FBI the authority to wiretap every American in the USA. This means less privacy for us in exchange for empowering an FBI that will be used to arrest people like us. If this were strictly to fight foreign terrorism why not use the NSA and CIA? If it's about fighting domestic terrorism why not list the domestic terrorist groups that the FBI is at war with?

Digging deeper into the grit of this bill reveals an ominmous part of the bill which would mandate giving the authorities the ability to intercept and unscramble encrypted messages. Once again we have an NSA that exists to unscramble or crack codes of foreigners and terrorists, why do we need to give the federal police this power unscramble or crack codes? It would be like giving the police the power to use government satellites, there are unintended consequences and the question is what threat exists to justify this level of scrutiny on the ordinary citizen?

Law enforcement officials contend that imposing such a mandate is reasonable and necessary to prevent the erosion of their investigative powers.

The New York Times article gives a statement from the FBI:"We’re talking about lawfully authorized intercepts, said Valerie E. Caproni, general counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’re not talking expanding authority. We’re talking about preserving our ability to execute our existing authority in order to protect the public safety and national security.”

Of course we can expect the FBI to want to empower itself by eternally increasing it's investigatory might, but when they are intending to wield that investigatory power on all of us we have to decide if this is a level of scrutiny we want to live with? Do we want our every activity on the internet to be monitored, scrutinized and scanned by the FBI? When will we finally say enough is enough?

The FBI claims it needs to increase it's power of domestic surveillance to protect "public safety" and fight "terrorism", these are left as nebulous undefined amalgamate objects. What exactly do we consider to be "public safety" and did the "public" have any say in defining it? Will the FBI use this power to go after violent criminals or will we continue to see prisons filled with non-violent criminals? What exactly does it take to trigger an investigation? Insulting the wrong person? Downloading too many MP3 files from Limewire? These are questions which have to be explored further.

The article lists critical objectives the bill hopes to accomplish:

Two of those goals in specific seem designed specifically to target file sharing and vpns.

• Foreign based providers that do business in the USA must install a domestic office to aid surveillance efforts.
• Developers of software that enables peer-to-peer communication must redesign their service to allow interception.

The reason I say both these efforts seem to target file sharers and ordinary citizens is because just like with gun control if someone is a criminal or a terrorist they aren't going to follow the law. A terrorist organization will simply build a clever botnet similar to how Ghostnet or many others work. The botnet would use a zero-day exploit or malware to stealthly break into thousands or millions of machines. The terrorist or criminal would then be able to use these bot computers to relay their encrypted messages to usenet or to any website.

Encryption via private free software by criminal or terrorists would not provide a mechanism for enforcement of any backdoor. The code would be open, the criminals would simply write, edit and compile the code themselves, ensuring no backdoor is in it, and once again the problem evolves into something else. Just as with gun control the encryption issue is an issue of arms control as encryption is seen as a munition. The FBI has fought an intense battle against consumer level encryption for a while because the FBI has the objective of maintaining high conviction rates and encryption makes conviction much more difficult.

Restricting access to civilians does not increase the security of civilians because criminals and terrorists never followed civilian laws to begin with, so it's pointless to believe their software engineers would either. On the other hand if you use Limewire to download music and movies the FBI may be coming for you the (digital terrorist).