More on Cisco Building Surveillance into Routers

An anonymous reader writes "The company recently published a proposal that describes how it plans to embed 'lawful interception' capability into its products. Among the highlights: Eavesdropping 'must be undetectable,' and multiple police agencies conducting simultaneous wiretaps must not learn of one another. If an Internet provider uses encryption to preserve its customers' privacy and has access to the encryption keys, it must turn over the intercepted communications to police in a descrambled form." See our earlier story and the RFC for background.

Comments

Another strike against Cisco.

[supabeast!]

Is it just me, or is this another great reason to buy cheaper, better network equipment from someone else? If I were running Cisco, I would be a little more concerned with the market share being sucked up by newer companies than with adding the cost of undetectable snooping to the product line.

Now I certainly feel justified in moving my company off of Cisco's overpriced products.

No

[sulli]

You should absolutely Blame Cisco!

This concept isn't new.

[gosand]

Privacy is for terrorists. Only terrorists have any need for privacy, so what are you trying to hide?Cisco is just being an upstanding and Patriotic American(TM) under the all-American DMCA, CTEA, and PATRIOT Acts, lawfully passed by the Congress Corporation, and signed into American Best-Practices by Chairman Bush.

I get what you are saying, but this is not a new concept. I used to work for a big cell-phone maker, in the cellular software division. I saw preliminary information about a wiretap project that would allow the carrier to intercept, log, and reroute calls if told to do so by some authorized government agency. I have no doubts this is possible, because we were working on real-time systems. To do it would take a second or two at most. I don't know what ever happened to that project, it kind of faded away and our department didn't actually work on it. But this was back in '94, so I am sure something similar has been implemented somewhere.

This isn't new, we are just able to find out about things like this now because of the internet. As much as we don't want "our" technology mucked with by the government, I think it is going to be tough to prevent.

phones

[ih8apple]

The only thing that surprises me is that they have been so slow to implement it. The government already has the equivalent of this for phone tapping:

Virtually all phone calls (cellular and land line) in America run through certain switches controlled by Verint and they are always used by law enforcement for wiretapping (and are constantly accused of abusing their authority). (Google for Comverse, the company's name before the recent change to Verint.)