“Federal officials are planning to seek legislation that would require social networking companies and voice-over-Internet service providers to adapt their technology so law enforcement agents can monitor users’ communications to catch suspected terrorists and other criminals.” - Washington Post
Because bin Laden has a Facebook.
This is a joke, right? Read this article if you want to be really angry.
All I have to say is… good luck with that.
Clayton -
Don’t you live in the United States too?
Yes, I do. I think the government way overestimates its ability to control the flow of information in the digital age. Basically, with the advent of computational cryptography, it is impossible for the government to permit the flow of some information while prohibiting the flow of other information. It’s basically an all-or-nothing proposition… if you want to stop people from communicating certain things digitally, you have to pull the kill switch on the whole damn thing. The government has consistently lost every war it has fought against the Internet. They are Luddites at heart and they think of the Internet as an analogy to mail or phones or television or radio and it’s just a completely new medium that is qualitatively different than anything that has gone before it.
Let me put it this way… the Internet is just a network. There have been networks for a long time… phone networks, telegraph networks, courier networks. etc. Most people think computers got more powerful when they got connected. This is not true. Networks got more powerful when they got computerized. It’s the computation that is the secret sauce, not the networking.
Clayton -
Suddenly that made more sense to me now. Were you saying good luck to the government in trying to pull it off, or were you saying good luck to me in trying to get away from the government? I thought you were saying the latter, haha.