Fifteen years after 9-11 it’s interesting to reflect on how much our lives have — and haven’t — changed as a result of that attack. One very obvious change for all of us since 9-11 is how much more connected we are to the world and to each other than we were back then. Politico has a great post quoting many of the people flying on Air Force One that day with President George W. Bush as his administration reacted to the unfolding events. Reading the story one thing that struck me was the lack of immediate information about the attacks available to the airborne White House. They had televisions with rabbit ear antennas and […]
Spies Like Us
Last week the Obama Administration announced that it would be shortly submitting legislation intended to force providers of all kinds of digital communication services (mail, voice, chat, Twitter, etc.) to install back doors in their services to allow government monitoring of all encrypted digital communication. No explicit details were given of how this is going to work, nor has the actual legislation yet been introduced. Hopefully it never will, because it simply won’t work.
It’s not that such technical back doors can’t be written (they can), nor is it even so onerous to force communication providers to change all their software since these services are rewritten often anyway. The problem is that such back doors will […]