FBI seeks to expand their power and ability to perform surveillance on all Web communications.

CNET is reporting that the FBI is quietly pushing a plan to require surveillance backdoors on social networks, VoIP, and Web e-mail providers. They also do not want Internet companies to oppose a law making those backdoors mandatory, natch.

The FBI is asking Internet companies not to oppose a controversial proposal that would require firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, and Google, to build in backdoors for government surveillance.

In meetings with industry representatives, the White House, and U.S. senators, senior FBI officials argue the dramatic shift in communication from the telephone system to the Internet has made it far more difficult for agents to wiretap Americans suspected of illegal activities, CNET has learned.

The FBI general counsel’s office has drafted a proposed law that the bureau claims is the best solution: requiring that social-networking Web sites and providers of VoIP, instant messaging, and Web e-mail alter their code to ensure their products are wiretap-friendly.

“If you create a service, product, or app that allows a user to communicate, you get the privilege of adding that extra coding,” an industry representative who has reviewed the FBI’s draft legislation told CNET…

…The FBI’s proposal would amend a 1994 law, called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, that currently applies only to telecommunications providers, not Web companies.

Apparently the feds are worried that its ability to do surveillance diminishes as technology advances. They call it “Going Dark” so their answer is to simply allow the ability to monitor everything on the Web.

[The FBI] singled out “Web-based e-mail, social-networking sites, and peer-to-peer communications” as problems that have left the FBI “increasingly unable” to conduct the same kind of wiretapping it could in the past…

..In addition to the FBI’s legislative proposal, there are indications that the Federal Communications Commission is considering reinterpreting CALEA to demand that products that allow video or voice chat over the Internet — from Skype to Google Hangouts to Xbox Live — include surveillance backdoors to help the FBI with its “Going Dark” program. CALEA applies to technologies that are a “substantial replacement” for the telephone system.

Liberty and Internet freedom be damned.

I suppose the upside, if you believe the government cares about Constitutional rights, is that they would still need a court order to activate the tap. Our government just gets bigger and bigger.

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