California is sitting on a massive amount of shale oil and could become the next oil boom state. But only if the industry can get the stuff out of the ground without upsetting the state’s powerful environmental lobby.

But they're forgetting something: the FBI isn't necessarily the only one who will get access to those backdoors. In fact, by requiring backdoors to enable surveillance on all sorts of systems, the FBI is almost guaranteeing that the bad guys will use those backdoors for their own nefarious purposes. It's not security, it's anti-security.

Wojciech Mazurczyk (10 points if you can pronounce that name) has found a way to hide data in the 70-bit packets that Skype sends by default when it’s detecting silence when you’re not talking. Skype itself does nothing with these packets when it receives them, but Mazurczyk’s team has discovered a way to intercept and decode them anyway, according to New Scientist.

In 2004, the Lafayette utilities system decided to provide a fiber-to-the-home service. The new network, called LUS Fiber, would give everyone in Lafayette a very fast Internet connection, enabling them to lower their electricity costs by monitoring and adjusting their usage. Push-back from the local telephone company, BellSouth Corp., and the local cable company, Cox Communications Inc., was immediate. They tried to get laws passed to stop the network, sued the city, even forced the town to hold a referendum on the project — in which the people voted 62 percent in favor. Finally, in February 2007, after five civil lawsuits, the Louisiana Supreme Court voted, 7-0, to allow the network.