Brouhaha (Score 2, Insightful)

As always I am a firm and loud voice against such government over stepping. On the other hand, we truely have too little information to make any sound judgements about the actual affect this proposed system will have.

I can imagine some fairly interesting possibilities though:

If the various three letter agencies actually attempted to log or filter all packet information they would have simply too much information to do any good with it. The information they would have would be less than insteresting though. All true terrorist communications would be encypted, encoded or hidden in such a way as to be missed by filters. The only thing left would be gigs of usenet and slashdot postings ranting about our government's pathetic attempts to catch terrorists (come on guys, there are much better ways that don't require so much time, money and invasion of liberty).

Microsoft will start to charge licensing fees for thier implementation of VPN, which will suddenly come into much wider use. I cannot imagine the FBI or NSA making much headway in filtering data from tunneled communications.

Stupid criminals who have not figured out how to use PGP and other privacy tools will be weeded out leaving a population of smarter super criminals to rule the net.

Seriously, this proposed tool could provide a serious threat to the privacy of all netizens, but it is not the ultimate threat. We need to worry much more about the possibility of our government becoming so fed up with thier own inaptitude that they outlaw encryption and anonymity. That would be a true disaster.