Fyi

Skype, BlackBerry, and other Internet communications services are under attack! The Obama administration and the FBI are pushing legislation that would ban online communications technologies like these unless their developers make it easy for the government to wiretap them.

The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) requires telecom companies to make it possible for the government to wiretap their networks. Now Obama and law enforcement want to expand CALEA to cover all online communications technologies, including peer-to-peer and social networking apps.

Companies that want to avoid stifling regulations, and those that actually care about our privacy rights, would have to leave the U.S. That'd reduce our prominence as a technology leader, and encourage the government to devise ever more heavy-handed ways of blocking Americans from using the offending technologies. Other companies would comply by creating back-doors that could lead to more privacy violations and make the Internet more vulnerable to attack: experts say wiretap-ready technologies would be much easier to hack.

An expansion of CALEA would be a tremendous blow to a free and open Internet.