Remember how we warned you that the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) was just a foot in the door? They the big brother types in government wouldn’t stop until they had their ears glued to all your doors and windows? We were right. The EFF has taken a look at proposed changes to the law and come up with this chilling analysis:

By itself, this expansion of CALEA is bad enough for your privacy. But the bill gets even worse — the law’s existing privacy protective provisions are “clarified” so that they do not “override [the carrier's] … primary duty” to help law enforcement spy on you. Furthermore, carriers will be forced to temporarily store your data stream and allow law enforcement agencies to analyze it on their own time. In other words, we are supposed to trust the government with all of our online interaction and hope that they only isolate the right packets.

Its time to give Phil Zimmermann’s new project, Zphone, a try if you are a VoIP user. Switching to secure IM and chat programs would also be recommended. We went through this fight with email and PGP and won. We can do it again.

Hat Tip: Bruce Schneier

[tags]security, encryption, big brother, eavesdropping, voip, eff, privacy, security[/tags]