New VoIP wiretapping rules a threat to the free market?

Even some Capitol Hill pundits don't like the idea of those latest VoIP backdoor wiretaps. As more and more of our communications go digital, they become easy to store and easy to access by government snoops, and some parts of the political spectrum are wary. The Hill, a venerable Capitol Hill rag, has penned a piece claiming that the new wiretapping scheme not only expands government's ability to listen in on the citizen's private life, but it also subjects today's innovators and inventors to seek government approval before they can release their creations on the free market.

The idea of building wiretap friendly backdoors into any piece of software that has a communications component could be quite stifling to the software industry. The millions of iPhone apps that allow ways to send messages between users would all have to be approved by the government having proven that the software would be easy to hack by the feds (but somehow secure enough for those micro-transactions everyone is hoping to cash in on). Can you imagine the Internet boom and the mobile data boom we just experienced being mired by an FDA-like government-run approval process?

Currently, there are numerous companies throwing their hat into the softphone-based VoIP arena--some with video calls others with unique pricing schemes--all usually promising that their user's credit card information or personal data transmission won't end up the subject of the latest YouTube viral video. Sadly, requiring software to be easy to wiretap threatens that user privacy while also making those bootstrapping young companies think twice about injecting their innovative energies into the VoIP market.

For more:
- read The Hill article

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