Obama backs call for tech backdoors
From the post:
President Obama wants a backdoor to track people’s social media messages.
The president on Friday came to the defense of British Prime Minister David Cameron’s call for tech companies to create holes in their technology to allow the government to track suspected terrorists or criminals.
“Social media and the Internet is the primary way in which these terrorist organizations are communicating,” Obama said during a press conference with Cameron on Friday.
“That’s not different from anybody else, but they’re good at it and when we have the ability to track that in a way that is legal, conforms with due process, rule of law and presents oversight, then that’s a capability that we have to preserve,” he said.
While Obama measured his comments, he voiced support for the views expressed by Cameron and FBI Director James Comey, who have worried about tech companies’ increasing trends towards building digital walls around users’ data that no one but them can access.
Rather than argue about tech backdoors someday, why not have government frontdoors?
ISPs can copy and direct all email traffic to and from .gov addresses to a big inbox on one of the cloud providers. So that the public can keep a closer eye on the activities of “our” government. Think of it as citizen oversight.
Surely no sensitive information about citizens finds its way into government email so we won’t need any filtering.
Petition your elected representatives for a government frontdoor. For federal, state and local governments. As taxpayers we own the accounts. Just like a private employer. The owners of those accounts wants access to them.
Now that would be open data that could make a real difference!
I first saw this in a tweet by Violet Blue.
PS: We also need phone records for office and cell phones of all government employees. Signals data I think they call it.