LXer: FBI Wants Backdoors in Facebook, Skype and Instant Messaging
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LXer: FBI Wants Backdoors in Facebook, Skype and Instant Messaging
Published at LXer:
The FBI has been lobbying top internet companies like Yahoo and Google to support a proposal that would force them to provide backdoors for government surveillance, according to CNET.The Bureau has been quietly meeting with representatives of these companies, as well as Microsoft (which owns Hotmail and Skype), Facebook and others to argue for a legislative proposal, drafted by the FBI, that would require social-networking sites and VoIP, instant messaging and e-mail providers to alter their code to make their products wiretap-friendly.
The ability to wire tape common phones has been in place for decades. The FBI would be unlikely to get a judge to allow them to view communications outside the US borders so they won't be watching TobiSGD. Other agencies might be able to.
I have only heard of a single person being thrown in jail based on wire tapping. A person issued death threats to a federal worker and because they used electronic transmission, the signal moved across State line. If it had not gone across state lines it would not have been a Federal case. A State threat was like 90 days where a Federal threat to an official was like 2 year. So don't use email.
You'd have to be some pretty good crook to draw the attention of the FBI. Things like kidnapping, murder and rape across State lines. Some very large bank heist maybe.
"According to the newly released 2010 Wiretap Report, federal and state courts issued 3,194 orders for the interception of wire, oral, or electronic communications in 2010,..."
As you can see 3000 in the US is a trivial number. It also includes any form of wiretap. These people are likely to be involved in kidnapping, rape and murders across state lines and other heinous crimes that fall under the FBI's authority. The crooks and the innocent will still have a right to a trial by jury. No lawyer will ever stop that.
The NSA already does everything and more than want the FBI supposedly want. Orwell was off by a few years but the age of Big Brother has been here for years.
The Bill of Rights and the Constitution aren't worth the paper they were written on these days.
Currently a female lawyer is trying to get her client free because the women in the courtroom are not dressing in burka's. Seems it offends the murderous terrorist's religious beliefs.
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