The FBI Wants To Charge Companies $25k A Day For Not Helping Them Spy On You

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The FBI is tired of tech companies letting users communicate in ways that they can't snoop on.

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They're so sick of it, in fact, that they're proposing a new law that would let them fine companies $25,000 for each day that the companies don't give them a back door, according to The New York Times.

As Bruce Schneier notes for Foreign Policy, this could have major repercussions for the development of secure technologies:

"The FBI believes it can have it both ways: that it can open systems to its eavesdropping, but keep them secure from anyone else's eavesdropping. That's just not possible. It's impossible to build a communications system that allows the FBI surreptitious access but doesn't allow similar access by others. When it comes to security, we have two options: We can build our systems to be as secure as possible from eavesdropping, or we can deliberately weaken their security. We have to choose one or the other."