The New York Times reports today that the Obama adminstration plans to propose “sweeping new regulations for the Internet” that will help them wiretap communications by criminal and terrorism suspects. In particular, they want anyone who provides encrypted communications services to have the ability to monitor, decrypt, and make messages available to the feds when they ask for them:
Susan Landau, a Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study fellow and former Sun Microsystems engineer, argued that the proposal would raise costly impediments to innovation by small startups. “Every engineer who is developing the wiretap system is an engineer who is not building in greater security, more features, or getting the product out faster,” she said.
I look forward to conservatives at Fox News and the Heritage Foundation expressing outrage over a proposal that will heighten uncertainty and burden our small businesses with yet another set of bureaucratic rules. After all, we know how important small businesses are to these guys. So they’ll surely object. Right?
