All I was saying is they already have the ability to listen to his customers whenever they want.
That's what encryption is for.
For years I've been encrypting anything that it is possible to encrypt. Figuring out which bit of traffic that comes out of my PC says, "Send me your brownie recipe," and which one says "Transfer the money to Mohammed," is going to be difficult. This is true for every security professional that I've worked with for the last ten years.
It's become true for many people that download from distributed networks because of the heavy-handedness of the RIAA/MPAA. All of the major distributed nets now support encryption. It's built right into their products and is increasingly incorporated into other products out of sight of the end user.
My mailserver, when it attempts to send or recieve mail from any other mailserver, first tries to encrypt the stream with TLS. My records indicate that about half of the remote mailservers that send me mail initiate an encrypted tunnel.
Mandating snoopiness will just cause more people to use encryption. The FedGov snoops will ask for, and be given, any data they want, but it will look like this:
(***BEGIN ENCRYPTION***)Fdwi3iewr2389yn98GJHB876599bgyftkhtfgy3lsddksbckd(***END ENCRYPTION***)
In ten years most of the traffic crossing the Internet will look like that. Sooner if this garbage is actually enforced. Then anyone getting a warrant is going to have to figure out how to make sense out of terabytes of the above. Good luck with that.
Ever read "Digital Fortress"? Whadya think of it? Pucky?
It will happen eventually.