The Obama administration plans to unveil a bill in 2011 that will make it easier for law enforcement to eavesdrop on Internet communication says a September 2010 New York Times article. Spearheaded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the bill would likely require service providers, including Facebook and Skype, to add “back doors” to their systems that would permit a government wiretap to capture an unscrambled version of any conversation. While the final content of the proposed bill has yet to be determined, the possible expansion of government access and the weakening of online security mechanisms have attracted widespread criticism from civil rights and electronic groups who are calling it a “recipe for disaster” and “dangerous.”

According to the article, officials from the White House, FBI, the Department of Justice and other agencies “have been concerned for years that changing communications technology could damage their ability to conduct surveillance.” Frustrated by sophisticated and often encrypted phone and e-mail technologies, U.S. officials say that law enforcement needs to improve its ability to eavesdrop on electronic conversations involving crimes.

The proposed bill is likely to require:

  • communications services that encrypt messages must technically be able to unscramble them

  • foreign-based providers in the U.S. must have a domestic office capable of intercepting communications

  • developers of software that enables person-to-person communication must redesign services to permit interception

Not all of the details of the proposed bill have been determined. Questions about the scope and cost of the changes and affect on foreign companies remain unanswered.

Jeanette Hofmann, an Internet specialist at the Social Science Research Center Berlin, says the proposal not only threatens freedom of speech, but might alter the way people use the Internet. “We use encryption technologies with many transactions over the Internet on a daily basis. And these transactions wouldn’t be secure any longer if backdoors would have to be built in,” she said. “It also concerns trivial things like shopping,” she told a German newspaper.
Valerie Capronie, the general counsel for the FBI, said the motivation is not an expansion of authority, but rather, “about preserving our ability to execute our existing authority in order to protect the public safety and national security.”

Many civil rights and electronic group advocates see it differently. “Lawful intercept’ systems built under current laws have already been abused for unlawful spying by governments and criminals,” said Seth Schoen, staff technologist at Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “Intentionally weakening security and including back doors is a recipe for disaster,” he added.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of Electronic Privacy Information Center, called this proposal unnecessary because the standards for issuing warrants have been lowered since 9/11 and there are other ways to investigate crimes and terrorist threats. “This view that law enforcement is being left in the dark by technology is a myth,” Rotenberg said. “The balance has swung radically toward enhanced law enforcement powers. For them to argue that it’s still not enough is just unbelievable,” he said.


This is not the first time the Obama administration has pushed to increase its authority over electronic activity. On Sept. 30, 2010 the Department of Treasury published proposed regulations that would require banks to report all electronic cross border financial transfers, dramatically expanding the current rule that requires reporting transfers over $10,000.  In June 2010, the U.S. Senate Homeland Security Committee approved the “kill switch” bill that would give the president the authority to order internet companies to turn off their services in times of a national emergency. Additionally, EFF discovered that the Department of Homeland Security used “a ‘Social Networking Monitoring Center’ to collect and analyze online public communication during President Obama’s inauguration.”