The Grumpy Geek

Susan Landau of Sun Microsystems has an excellent post up at the Washington Post. The idiots in Congress caved in last week and gave even more latitude in surveillance of communications to the NSA. Applying for secret warrants which are almost never denied and can be filed up to 72 hours after surveillance begins is just too much due process for them to deal with.

Even setting aside the civil liberties issues (which is a huge deal on it’s own), this is just stupid. We just heard about what this kind of surveillance built in to the phone networks can result in with the Greek wiretapping scandal (see Bruce Schneier’s blog.) Regardless of how you feel about the “intelligence” community having this ability, reducing national security by adding what will most certainly be insecure back doors in the process is just asinine.