Slashdot Mirror
Feds Want to Tap VoIP
An anonymous reader writes "From the Globe and Mail: The FBI and the U.S. Justice Department have renewed their efforts to wiretap voice conversations carried across the Internet. Federal and local police rely heavily on wiretaps. In 2002, the most recent year for which information is available, police intercepted nearly 2,200,000 conversations with court approval, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Wiretaps for that year cost taxpayers $69.5 million, and approximately 80 per cent were related to drug investigations."
"The FCC should ignore pleas about national security and sophisticated criminals because sophisticated parties will use noncompliant VoIP, available open source and offshore," said Jim Harper of Privacilla.org, a privacy advocacy Web site. "CALEA for VoIP will only be good for busting small-time bookies, small-time potheads and other nincompoops."
Mr. Harper is absolutely correct, anyone with a little bit of sophistication can think of numerous ways around this legislation. Sorry Unlce Sam but the cat's out of the bag and there is no putting it back. Of course this will still be useful at catching small time drug dealers/users, and is another example of the drug war eating away at civil liberties.
You don't need encryption for protection from wiretaps in those situations, the spooks are already required to disconnect (or ditch-and-not-listen-to any recording) the instant they realize it's a call that is unrelated to the matter being investigated.
The analog phone network is pretty physically secure (messing with the wires through town will attract police, and the central offices are pretty secure places) so there's really not that much risk of an unauthorized analog wiretap.
The system's pretty good as it is, the spooks just want to make sure technology doesn't take away what's one of their strongest tools for stopping crimes before they get any worse.