Privacy: Fibbies want access to your internet traffic

A small piece of technology: unless you have a "virtual private network", all internet traffic, be it email or browsing, does not go "point to point." It passes around the world picking a route that is supposedly the quickest and most efficient but which is also dependent on the agreements ISPs have with backbone providers. The backbone is the primary structure of the internet and in over-simplified terms, it's the massive capacity cables that carry and distribute traffic.

That traffic is analysed and directed by massive servers.

Because the telecoms industry is dominated by a small number of players, and many of those players are headquartered in the US, that means that your internet traffic either passes through the USA or is handled outside the USA by a US controlled company.

US law places obligations on its corporate citizens wherever they are in the world. We already know that from the way it imposes e.g. OFAC on foreign subsidiaries of US companies.

On Wednesday, the FBI told a House of Representatives hearing that it wanted to extend its current plans which are to allow full monitoring of government owned networks for what it termed "illegal activity."

FBI Director Robert Meuller told the Commitee that he wants authority to monitor all internet traffic ""whether it be .mil, .gov, .com--whichever network you're talking about."

He did not define "illegal traffic." Given the USA's current focus on internet gambling, that's one target he could be reasonably thinking about, as well as the more obvious identification of association between criminals, porn rings, and so on.

The hearing had been called to discuss so called "cybercrime." Currently, a government network monitoring system called "Einstein" is checking traffic at 15 Federal agencies.

Darrell Issa, a member of the House, pointed out that there are already measures in place for search warrants where there is evidence of a crime and wondered what the new measures would add. But he was interested in the idea that companies might be able to opt-in to a security system to identify and defend against attacks on their systems - but that did not appear to be what Meuller wants - his idea is for widespread warrantless surveillance on any internet traffic that the FBI wants to listen in to.

And that's your internal communications with remote offices or officers on the move, for example.