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bostonreview.net/

Spying Online Is Perilous and Unnecessary Evgeny Morozov

Susan Landau,
Surveillance or Security?: The Risks Posed by New Wiretapping Technologies
The MIT Press, $29.95 (cloth)

Luis González / Flickr.com / Una cierta mirada

Back in the day, when bad guys used telephones, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies would listen in with wiretaps. As long as phone companies cooperated—and they had to, by law—it was a relatively straightforward process. The Internet, however, separated providers of communications services—Skype, Facebook, Gmail—from those running the underlying infrastructure. Thus, even if the FBI obtains a suspect’s traffic data from their Internet service provider (ISP)—Comcast, Verizon, etc.—it may be difficult to make sense of it, especially if the suspect has been using encrypted services. This loophole has not been lost on child pornographers, drug traffickers, terrorists, and others who prize secret communications.

To catch up with the new technologies of malfeasance, FBI director Robert Mueller traveled to Silicon Valley last November to persuade technology companies to build “backdoors” into their products. If Mueller’s wish were granted, the FBI would gain undetected real-time access to suspects’ Skype calls, Facebook chats, and other online communications—and in “clear text,” the industry lingo for unencrypted data. Backdoors, in other words, would make the Internet—and especially its burgeoning social media sector—“wiretappable.” 

The FBI’s plans have left civil libertarians and privacy advocates worried. The backdoors, they say, would make surveillance too easy and might result in over-collection of personal data. Companies in Silicon Valley are worried, too. Complying with demands for backdoors, they say, is costly, thus burdensome for startups, thus a limit on innovation.

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