Well, the government is up to more big brother tactics yet again.

http://news.com.com/2100-1028_3-6091942.html?part=rss&tag=6091942&subj=news

What bothers me about this?

Many things are bad about government not needing a key to get in, since they already have one. Do I need to remind everyone that many sensitive computers had no password at all, letting the UK ‘hacker’ into computers?

What happens of course is that one of these computers will be unprotected, millions of people will have private information stolen, and the government will scream NATIONAL SECURITY… hence all lawsuits dropped.

Or, for instance let’s assume that this sort of monitoring equipment needs a key of some sort? What if that key is stored on a laptop that’s stolen?

We all know that your telephone conversations can be looked at, VOIP like Vonage is up next, requiring hundreds of millions of monies to be spent upgrading allowing the government to not have to crack encryption to listen.

AT&T has already allowed the NSA to install sniffing equipment that lets the government look at possibly 1/2 of the United States network traffic. I believe that the NSA has found this to be too expensive, and Congress is not going to allow more 2 Billion spending sprees to tap another major provider.

The easiest solution of course is to pass a law that puts the burden on -us- to pay the increased fees so that the NSA/CIA/FBI can watch us, without any oversight from the normal branches of government.

With the major appliances that power the Internet having a backdoor to re-route traffic to any number of locations to watch could wield crazy power to the one in control.

Your TV would stop working, power stations could be shut down, radio would no longer get feeds. TV from dishes would cease to function all from one single flip of a switch.

Sure, Cisco already has many options available in expensive switching equipment to do some major wiretapping, but the FBI wants more, unfettered access to a tool, just for them.

Not only do they want it in major appliances, installed by them in datacenters, but they want it in -any- equipment capable of routing traffic. That would mean the equipment in your home, is capable of letting the FBI to watch you and you’d never know.

Living in the United States, we cringe at the ‘Great Firewall Of China’, thinking we will never have such a thing.

Sit back and let this happen… and we’ll have the:

“Great security hole of United States”