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The authors of this bill fundamentally misunderstand how the Internet works. They believe that all useful Internet communication is centralized: for two partie
by jakevoytko 16y ago
The authors of this bill fundamentally misunderstand how the Internet works.
They believe that all useful Internet communication is centralized: for two parties to communicate, a third party (GMail, AIM, Facebook, HN, Twitter, etc) must relay the messages. But this isn't even true for email! Most companies run their own local servers. There is no central broker to tap - it's just P2P communications. Hell, if you and I open our college number theory books, implement RSA, and share port numbers and IP addresses, the law hasn't considered us. But we don't need to do that - there are plenty of expert-reviewed P2P technologies that allow for secure communication. It gets worse: I could use a VPN, and pipe my results through TOR, and use secure proxies. People just use centralized services because they're nice.
In this case, the government is asking citizens to sacrifice their liberty (and companies to sacrifice their valuable time) for something that can only be ensured by direct access to a suspect's computer, without providing any solid evidence that our safety has been threatened. FUD at its finest.
- CWuestefeld 16y agoThere is no central broker to tap - it's just P2P communications According to the article, the proposed regulations would cover that: Developers of software that enables peer-to-peer communication must redesign their service to allow interception. Of course, that doesn't mean they'd have a prayer of enforcing it, but I don't like the idea of being forced into what would be illegal activity to preserve my own privacy. It seems to me that this provision would be hard to make stick, what with the Clinton-era precedents that encryption code is protected under the 1st Amendment. It's probably time to pull out my old "This T-shirt is a munition" shirt [1] [1] http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/ http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/
- gmlk 16y agoHow does that cover in anyway the case where I run my own SMTP/IMAP server for me and my minions, and we are encrypting all email with GNU Privacy Guard using the GPGMail plugin to Apple's Mail.app?
- CWuestefeld 16y agoAs I read the article (without having seen the actual proposal, and probably not able to understand the legal-ese if I had), you just would not be allowed to do that. You'd have to use some alternative to GPG, that has a law enforcement back door.