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Comment by Lionsion | Hacker News Reader

> The legislation makes an exception for mandates, requests or court orders that are authorized under the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, a 1994 law requiring telephone companies to make changes to their network design in order to make it easier for the government to wiretap phone calls.

What's this mean, precisely? That device-level backdoors would be forbidden, but network-level backdoors would be allowed?

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My guess is that they don't want to interfere with long-established procedures for wire-tapping (which probably pre-date 194). But perhaps the effect would be what you suggest.

If so that's good because it is still an important difference that the govt merely orders service providers about rather than mandating that your own device work against you.

For a high-level intro to wiretapping and the 4th amendment law around it, the Illustrated Guide to the Law is good: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1704

"Network-level backdoors", a.k.a. CALEA have already been allowed for two and a half decades. That wouldn't change, but this would prevent them from forcing Apple to backdoor the encryption on your iPhone, for example.

I would say it's safe to assume that the law would protect data that stays on your phone, but would not protect communication. So you could encrypt the contents of your phone but phone calls, SMS, and IM would still be possible to back door.

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