The Obama administration is drafting a proposal for a new law that would enable the government to intercept and decode all Internet communications, including encrypted data, Charlie Savage at The New York Times reported this week. The proposed legislation, which would require services like BlackBerry, Skype and social networks to comply with wiretap orders much like telephone services are required to do, is raising red flags among privacy and Internet security experts. It is feared that a mandate to provide interception capabilities--essentially "back doors" into encrypted data--would make it easier for hackers to intercept data as well.

Telecommunications providers are required under wiretap laws to provide interception capabilities to the government, but some Internet-based services, such as peer-to-peer communications, encrypt data so that providers cannot unscramble it. The proposal in the works by the FBI, National Security Agency, Department of Justice and the White House--which could be sent to Capitol Hill early next year--would require such services to be reconfigured so that they could be decrypted.

This is the latest proposal in an ongoing effort--accelerated after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001--by the federal government to enhance its police powers. The FBI has long sought greater abilities to spy on encrypted communications, and it lost a major initiative to do so in the 1990s, recalls Ryan Singel at Wired. Government records show that it is rare that encryption hobbles a law enforcement initiative. Among the 2376 wiretap cases approved in 2009, just one reportedly involved encryption. 

It is understandable that law enforcement seeks powerful tools to do its job, but from a pragmatic viewpoint, the kind of mandate sought now could make the Internet much less secure, writes Robert X. Cringely at InfoWorld.

"[T]his could turn out to be a nightmare from which we never awake because, unlike with the closed phone system, we're talking about the open Internet. Though the phone system could be hacked in its day (that is, after all, where hacking originated), it's a whole 'nother animal than the InterWebs," Cringely writes. "If the feds can sneak in through the backdoor via these types of communications, so can the bad guys. In fact, the bad guys will probably get there first and have enough time to tidy up the place and bake cookies."

The proposal underway not only raises the usual alarms regarding diminishing privacy rights, but it also is eliciting concerns about the expense that service providers, such as Research in Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM) and AOL, would incur to comply, and what that would mean for the cost of services. It could be quite costly for these companies to pay for the technologies for logging, intercepting and decrypting communications, writes Jason Mick in a post at DailyTech. Peer-to-peer networks would have to be rebuilt, making P2P applications much more expensive. 

"The planned legislation is indicative of how the U.S. government is increasingly looking to follow the lead of nations like China and Saudi Arabia in controlling its nation's networks and performing surveillance on the users of those networks," Mick writes.

For more:
- see Charlie Savage's article at The New York Times
- see Ryan Singel's post at Wired
- see Robert X. Cringely's post at InfoWorld
- see Jason Mick's post at DailyTech

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