Chris Soghoian writes:
Last Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing focused on law enforcement surveillance of modern Internet services.
Although both the New York Times and CNET have stories on the hearing, I don’t think either publication covered the important details (nor did they take the time to extract and post video clips).
The FBI is no longer calling for encryption backdoors
Read more on slight paranoia, where Chris includes excerpts from the hearing as well as his thoughts on what he thinks the FBI will be pushing for. I think Chris is dead-on in his predictions of what the FBI wants, and as he suggests, some of the “asks” will likely not get a lot of media attention – unless the privacy community gets our act together to make a lot of noise. Certainly any attempt by the government to require cloud services to provide capability for real-time interception of communications (think of the government having the ability to monitor your chats in real-time) is an issue that the public can appreciate in terms of its potential for abuse – that is, if the public doesn’t stick its collective head in the sand while it mutters, “Well, if you’ve got nothing to hide…”
One thought – based on only one cup of coffee, and hence, somewhat muddled – is whether putting a hole in the security of cloud services to enable such monitoring would somehow violate any non-U.S. laws on data protection and security or make non-U.S. entities more leery of using American cloud providers. If so, could any such “ask” or requirement put American cloud service providers at an economic disadvantage?