In one sense, this battle is about the First Amendment in the global context. What we call free speech, a lot of countries deem illegal. If U.S. firms like AOL or Yahoo -- or for that matter, colleges and universities that provide Internet service -- must affirmatively prevent U.S. speech from reaching foreign audiences, that's a big burden and a big chilling effect.

The FCC's overreach is an attempt to overrule Congress's decision to exclude 'information services,' ... By mandating backdoors in any service that has the capability to replace functions provided by a telephone, the FCC has stretched the statute to the breaking point.

It's simply a very bad idea for privacy and for free speech for the government to design any technology, much less the Internet, to be surveillance-friendly.

Even worse, it shows how the government and private industry make backroom deals to weaken our privacy by compromising everyday equipment like printers. The logical next question is: what other deals have been or are being made to ensure that our technology rats on us?

AT&T customers reasonably expect that their communications are private and have long trusted AT&T to follow the law and protect their privacy.

AT&T's customers reasonably expect that their communications are private and have long trusted AT&T to follow the law and protect that privacy.

This may be appropriate for cattle, pets or packages, but for humans it is a very different issue.

This enables the government to have a much easier time of knowing what private people are up to without any sort of process or consent.

This is not within the scope of the original testing.

These laws were written some time ago. They were careful in some places and not in others.