Say goodbye to your privacy, again

Privacy is like a girlfriend that you’re helplessly in love with. She comes back every so often, just to give you a false hope and break your heart all over again. This time around it is not a case of some insignificant ID code that will remotely ever track what you’re doing like the RFID or Pentium 4 serial id. Nope, much worse.

The following legislation, CALEA, requires manufacturers and Internet Service Providers to allow for easy tapping by the law enforcement. FCC has concluded that the arguments of VoIP replacing common POTS are strong enough to warrant easy tapping by your government — into your ISP, into your router, into your modem, perhaps directly into your own OS. So you were concerned about how many people would know if you looked at Jenna Jameson by tracking your P4 or RFID.. Now feds can simply RDP into your system and look at My Pictures or cache folders. Will they? Highly unlikely. So we should just ignore this, right? right?

NO. Deadline for full compliance is 18 months from the date of the order, signed on August 5th, 2005. This gives you exactly 18 months to dump your commercial router and replace your networking gear with something free and open that can detect remote intrusions into your own network. Not specifically because you don’t trust the federal government but because we live in the age of rapid deployment and broadband, so if the fed has the capability to see your every move so do the criminals and hackers. There is a very good reason why things like full disclosure and proof-of-concept explots exist: to force vendors into proactive security assesments and management. Without full disclosure, vendors tend to conspire to hide security problems, more often than not.

So, do you think you should trust such a vendor to power your network?