Greetings. Crucial Internet issues seem to be crawling out of the woodwork over the last few weeks, and the latest is today's New York Times report that the Obama administration will be seeking sweeping new Internet wiretapping regulations, apparently including a requirement for all encrypted communications to be capable of being decrypted on demand by the government.

While we haven't seen any details yet, on its face this appears to be a dramatic, and (I believe it's reasonable for me to assert) radical expansion of surveillance capabilities, previously associated with countries such as Saudi Arabia (e.g. their recent demands for RIM BlackBerry communications access).

Such sweeping surveillance requirements by the U.S. would enormously increase security risks by fundamentally weakening the critical underpinnings of end-to-end encryption structures and systems.

I'll obviously have much more to say on this topic as details emerge.

I've been booked back onto Coast to Coast AM tonight to very briefly discuss the reported proposal, during the news segment that starts around 10 PM PDT. [Station List] [Coast to Coast AM "Backgrounder" (Wired)]

This will likely be an extremely brief segment -- just a few minutes -- but hopefully enough for now to at least raise some awareness about such an extremely important issue.

Be seeing you.

--Lauren--