DISQUS

Technology Liberation Front: Will the Internet Destroy the Foreign/Domestic Distinction?

  • jordan vance · 3 years ago
    Tim,

    While that's a worry, it's always been true that this could "accidentally" happen. In fact, as I heard on NPR last night, that regardless of whether a warrant was issued by the FISC, if domestic calls were intercepted they had to be basically dumped from the information used and forgotten about.

    How hard will this be in the long run to make sure that it's not a domestic call? A lot harder for sure. But it was always possible to disguise where one was calling from.

    It seems to me that this is just another iteration of the encryption quandry. How can we release strong encryption techniques into the wild, when they might just be used against us? What this goes to show is that a focus needs to be turned towards human intelligence as SigInt (not sigint or sigalarm) becomes more ubiquitous but altogether more difficult to gather.

    It is, of course, difficult to map legalities from the real world into the virtual world. Look, the idea of copyright isn't broken. The duration of copyright is. People are violating copyright left and, well, right, and so far nobody has been able to figure out how to say no, you can't do that. The phone regulations? I don't find them to be a huge problem. For E911 calls, the user is taking that risk. That is a question of the technology being able to catch up to the law. The 4th amendment still holds those protections. If the government accidentally acquires domestic intel in a foreign intel investigation, they can't use it. IF the government is breaking the law, then it is a problem with the government, not the technology.

    But what about electronic communications? Wasn't it possible to bounce calls all over the world, a la Sneakers? I just see this as an extension of that.