FBI: A Backdoor in Every Router

CALEA (Computer Assistance Law Enforcement)
is quietly in the background of current news again, because the FBI is
pushing congress to mandate that all future routing equipment
manufactured will include back doors for law enforcement. Like in CALEA
mandates for telephone switching equipment, such back doors require no
warrant to activate, and hence can be secretly enabled at will. Some
vendors have already eagerly embraced CALEA inspired backdoors to
internet routing equipment in anticipation of future intercept
mandates, thereby already compromising the integrity and security their
current and future customers. This approach of using backdoors on
Internet connected systems, even more so than the original CALEA
mandates for wiretapping backdoors in telephone switching centers, is a
danger to both our infrastructure and our society.

CALEA has required that all telephone switching equipment manufactured
since 1994 must include backdoors to enable wiretapping. While the need
for lawful legal intercept is estimated to be in the range of 1000 or
so wiretaps per year, and past practices have required not only
warrants but also physical access to switching centers, these
requirements were neither unduly burdensome, nor unduly expensive for
the limited number of lawful investigations normally engaged in per
year, whether back then or today. What these historic pre-CALEA
limitations did assure is that the cost of mass privacy invasion would
be far too expensive to ever effectively undertake.

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