There is no central broker to tap - it's just P2P communications
According to the article, the proposed regulations would cover that:
Developers of software that enables peer-to-peer communication must redesign their service to allow interception.
Of course, that doesn't mean they'd have a prayer of enforcing it, but I don't like the idea of being forced into what would be illegal activity to preserve my own privacy.
It seems to me that this provision would be hard to make stick, what with the Clinton-era precedents that encryption code is protected under the 1st Amendment. It's probably time to pull out my old "This T-shirt is a munition" shirt [1]
How does that cover in anyway the case where I run my own SMTP/IMAP server for me and my minions, and we are encrypting all email with GNU Privacy Guard using the GPGMail plugin to Apple's Mail.app?
As I read the article (without having seen the actual proposal, and probably not able to understand the legal-ese if I had), you just would not be allowed to do that. You'd have to use some alternative to GPG, that has a law enforcement back door.
According to the article, the proposed regulations would cover that:
Developers of software that enables peer-to-peer communication must redesign their service to allow interception.
Of course, that doesn't mean they'd have a prayer of enforcing it, but I don't like the idea of being forced into what would be illegal activity to preserve my own privacy.
It seems to me that this provision would be hard to make stick, what with the Clinton-era precedents that encryption code is protected under the 1st Amendment. It's probably time to pull out my old "This T-shirt is a munition" shirt [1]
[1] http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/shirt/