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Verisign Offers Wiretapping Services
LinuxDeckard writes "According to this article at FindLaw, VeriSign will soon be offering its 'NetDiscovery' wire tapping services for a monthly fee. NetDiscovery will allow Telecoms to comply with court ordered wire taps." Verisign's press release is informative. This appears to be tapping of voice calls rather than internet usage. I assume it would work something like this: telecom company gets a wiretap notification from the FBI or local police; it routes all calls to/from $TARGET through a Verisign switch; Verisign does the tapping and reporting to the tappers. If you think this doesn't affect you, keep in mind that under the PATRIOT Act the barrier for wiretapping is set very low indeed.
This is like, so 1984.
When why will they stop trampling on our rights? When the private sector offers wiretapping, then the terrorists have already won.
Let's not give Verisign a hard time - they're just trying to make a buck by filling a need that is currently out there. If you really have a problem with this, you should focus on the politics that allow wire tapping in the first place and then consider taking an active role in government by contacting your Senator or Representative.
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It is ironic that one of the sleaziest, untrustworthy companies on the internet expects people to buy "trust" in the form of digital certification from them. I suggest people remember that next time they need a certificate and instead turn to one of their competitors.
If any small telco needs to create a secure repository, some will not be as secure as others... and privacy might be more compromised that it should according to the wiretap order (i.e. hackers accessing the wiretapped phone calls...)
OTOH, this is a kind of single point of failure I do not entirely like...
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
Why would Verisign get into such an unrelated business as this? They're not a telecom company! If CALEA-compliance is too expensive for the telcos, I can't believe that Verisign is better positioned. This is totally unrelated to their business model!
The only question where the constitution is silent is whether the restriction of rights (in this case privacy) is the lesser of two evils (the other evil being not catching the 'not so law abiding'). Is it? Do we believe it to be so? Is the potential for abuse of power justified? Does the end justify the means?
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html
Ideally this is good. Wiretaps are a needed part of law-enforcement. You have evidence against a suspect, you go to a judge, show him the evidence and he makes a informed decison on the matter. Wiretaps, traditionally, were pretty hard to get.
The part where this breaks down is the recent Patriot act (damn I hate calling it that), where a FBI agent hands a judge a list of 5,000 names and says "I think that these people might be terrorists, gimme a wiretap."
"Do you have any evidence Mr. FBI agent?"
"What do you care Mr. Judge? US law says you have to let me spy on these people, even if I don't have any tangible evidence. Just don't mind my wife's name hidden in the list."
"Ok, here's your signature." (Thinking to himself: Man I wish my job was more than fulfilling the function of a rubber stamp.)
Without the aforementioned act, this would be semi-good news. With that act, more peoples privacy will now likely be senselessly violated. Oh, well.
No, you generate your own key and VeriSign never sees it.
Think of the CALEA package as simply creating more incentives to use cryptography.
Actually the CALEA package is there because at present the telcos have a massive problem. The government is not going to give further extensions to CALEA and if they are out of compliance they can get fined $10K per day per warrant.
The back end of the telco service is a mess. The system was designed for a single operator with the security model being 'if you can send data to this switch you must be trusted'. That was a goodish model before they broke up the phone company and allowed anyone to become a telco with very few restrictions.
Nobody knows the extent of unauthorized phone tapping, we do know it goes on but there is absolutely no way to measure it. At present the security is all security through obscurity. However those controls are not very deep, basically there is an open access system with some naive detection/retribution stuff. Enough to keep out the script kiddies but not a well resourced adversary.
The real task for CALEA implementation is to introduce controls so that only authorized parties can make taps.
If you're describing the calls between yourself and your girlfriend as being "boring", I think you have problems other than fear of wiretapping.
While I'm at it it was not the Lower East Side. It's Lower Manhattan. Technically on the West side if you want to get longitudinal about it.
I think you maybe you should rethink your attitude about the deaths that occurred there. While you are gleefully dancing around celebrating the death of some Gordon Gecko types in suspenders and too much hair gel, most of the people who died there were office workers and civil servants.
WTC was an ugly building, no doubt, twin monstrous births with street presence that was downright hostile to human life and a "plaza" that seemed to have been designed by a late twentieth century De Chirico who'd stopped worrying about alienation and learned to love the brutalism. But that's still no reason to fly airplanes into it and kill all those people.
I suppose I should appreciate your candor as it reflects the fact that most of America hates NYC with a ignorant zeal reserved for inscrutable foreign enemies like Vietnam in the 60s, or they did on Sept. 10th. NYC actually has all the "community" their own communities lack and just as they hated NYC in ignorance, they now profess to love it hypocritically.
I guess the "wrong" people attacked NYC, and we should just be grateful they were dark of hue. If it had been one of your own "heartland" homegrown terrorists many Slasdotters would be saying as you seem to be "Nooooo Yawk City ? They asked fer it!"
I'm sure you can appreciate that just as some news reporters and commentators predictably inflated the WTC dead to 7 and 10 thousand, by the same token you can't come to precise figure of the dead by listing identified bodies or even counting bodies.
Don't pin on Manhattan's Lower East Side or Wall Street even , the blame for John Ashcroft's grabbing of Police State surveillance powers. The FBI -= HAD =- all the information anybody would need to roll up this terror plot before Sept. 11. They don't NEED any additional powers than they had on Sept 10th 2001. Demanding more is John Ashcroft's personal desire to police Americans, not to detect and capture foreign terrorists.
They didn't catch these terrorists because the foreign policy elites of this country are in bed with Saudi Arabia and didn't want to hear anything about Saudis, many of whom we trained ourselves in terror operations. It would be embarrassing to the CIA, and to Big Oil, and especially to the Bush family who have been business partners with the Bin Laden family and other Saudi terror sponsors for a long time.