From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. If the feds want to legally tap your phone, they, A, persuaded judge to give them a warrant,

B, present that warrant to the phone company, and C, the phone company activates the tap.

Easy peasy, a practice codified in a 1994 law known as Kalia.

But these days, tech-savvy criminals and terrorists and pretty much everybody else

use Skype and encrypted Blackberries and Google and Facebook.

What's old-school law enforcement to do?

This week, the New York Times revealed a White House plan to be proposed next year that would force all the 21st century communications networks to construct the same wiretap capabilities that now exist for the phone.

Charlie Savage, Washington correspondent for The Times, broke the story this week.

And he says that even if the proposal results in legislation, it could be an incredibly difficult law to implement.

If the service is located on servers that are overseas, it's not subject to a U.S. court order.

If they're using a form of encryption, that means that even the service

provider can't say what this data is. Or if it's a peer-to-peer software like Skype, there

is no central place to go and capture all that data.

If you build a backdoor into these various networks that the government has access to,

it seems to me that every hacker and his brother, not to mention foreign governments, would

try to enter the same back door, no?

If you create a security hole for a lawful purpose, it's inevitable, the critics say that it will be exploited for

unlawful purposes. Greece has a law that requires its phone systems to be wiretappable,

and in 2005 it was discovered that somebody, still unknown, had hacked into that capacity,

forwarding copies of cell phone calls of about 100 top officials to an

unknown phone where they could be listened to, including the prime minister's phone.

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