>>"The sole reason why we are in a position where a service with end-to-end encryption has been provided worldwide is the artificial separation of telecoms and information service providers by the FCC in the USA. USA has allowed the latter to skip a lot of requirements including legal intercept"
There's a difference between how the two are handled, yes. But I don't think it should be resolved in the direction you seem (possibly) to think. With old phone systems, people needed the phone companies to handle the implementation of communication for them. Nobody could whip up a quick communications protocol and implement it independently over the wires. But today data and bandwidth are commoditized. Not only do we not need BT or AT&T controlling how we send messages to each other, they cannot control how we send messages to each other.
Unless Authority declares there shall be no unapproved types of data transfer - that everything must be in pre-approved formats that they can read, then any of us can whip up a communication system in a week which they cannot scan.
So what's the proposal here - companies are to be fined for doing things that members of the public can do for free? Commercial entities are put at a technical disadvantage over free alternatives? Neither seems fair to me.
Along with the other article on El Reg about Facebook being blamed for deaths in Israel because they didn't pro-actively spy on their users enough to satisfy the Israeli authorities, I'm actually, -gasp- finding myself defending Facebook this week! (A bit ;) )
Biting the hand that feeds IT
