Police want backdoor to Web users' private data

Way to be incredibly LTTP.

does this spell doom for hackers who circumvent consoles

I don't really see any mention of a backdoor. They're requesting that they can send requests (which they currently do through paper) for info electronically instead.

And of course they use the whole "children" excuse...

In an incendiary October 2009 essay, however, Kardasz wrote that Internet service providers that do not keep records long enough "are the unwitting facilitators of Internet crimes against children" and called for new laws to "mandate data preservation and reporting." He predicts that those companies will begin to face civil lawsuits because of their "lethargic investigative process."

Click to expand...

Which is not directly related to what the article's about (switching the current process over from paper to electronics).

Hemanshu (Hemu) Nigam, MySpace's chief security officer, said in an interview with CNET on Tuesday that: "You can be very supportive of law enforcement investigations and at the same time be very cognizant and supportive of the privacy rights of our users. Every time a legal process comes in, whether it's a subpoena or a search order, we do a legal review to make sure it's appropriate."

Click to expand...

Whether info can be considered a backdoor or not depends on whether the place in question checks out the request first, not what medium the request came from. Obviously if such a system was set into place there would be required checks to make sure the requests were real, they're not there now because it's assumed things would be checked into because of how long they take, and people lie about stuff just to speed up the currently-slow process.

Nigam said that MySpace accepts law enforcement requests through e-mail, fax, and postal mail, and that it has a 24-hour operations center that tries to respond to requests soon after they've been reviewed to make sure state and federal laws are being followed.

Click to expand...

See? Myspace already takes requests BOTH ways, but still checks to make sure they're legal.

This isn't a request for a backdoor. This entire article just looks like fear-mongering to me.