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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."
Well, because there are some legitimate reasons to tap communications of any sort (as in, got a judge to OK it), I figure that it was bound to happen at some point. Though it still creeps me out and makes me eagerly anticipate a nice encrypted VoIP client...
That's why I'll continue to encrypt all important (and unimportant!) conversations. For email I always use GPG (regardless of how important the message is). For VoIP, if I ever use it, I'll be sure to send the voice data through encrypted channels. Frankly, there's no excuse for not encrypting everything. Let them make laws; beat them with the tech.
:)
/dev/urandom) to your friends :) That will never be illegal, and encrypted data is the same as random data without the key!
And when they outlaw the tech, remember that you can learn how to write encryption software yourself. See Ciphersaber. There you'll learn to write your very own crypto code, and you'll remember how to do it again. I did it a few months ago and could still code something decent up
So don't worry about this. Just encrypt, and when encryption becomes illegal send lots of random data (netcat
My other car is first.
The right to privacy is spread implicitly throughout the Bill of Rights. But when the United States Constitution was framed, the Founding Fathers saw no need to explicitly spell out the right to a private conversation. That would have been silly. Two hundred years ago, all conversations were private. If someone else was within earshot, you could just go out behind the barn and have your conversation there. No one could listen in without your knowledge. The right to a private conversation was a natural right, not just in a philosophical sense, but in a law-of-physics sense, given the technology of the time.
But with the coming of the information age, starting with the invention of the telephone, all that has changed. Now most of our conversations are conducted electronically. This allows our most intimate conversations to be exposed without our knowledge. Cellular phone calls may be monitored by anyone with a radio. Electronic mail, sent across the Internet, is no more secure than cellular phone calls. Email is rapidly replacing postal mail, becoming the norm for everyone, not the novelty it was in the past.
Until recently, if the government wanted to violate the privacy of ordinary citizens, they had to expend a certain amount of expense and labor to intercept and steam open and read paper mail. Or they had to listen to and possibly transcribe spoken telephone conversation, at least before automatic voice recognition technology became available. This kind of labor-intensive monitoring was not practical on a large scale. It was only done in important cases when it seemed worthwhile. This is like catching one fish at a time, with a hook and line. Today, email can be routinely and automatically scanned for interesting keywords, on a vast scale, without detection. This is like driftnet fishing. And exponential growth in computer power is making the same thing possible with voice traffic.
Perhaps you think your email is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don't you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something? If you hide your mail inside envelopes, does that mean you must be a subversive or a drug dealer, or maybe a paranoid nut? Do law-abiding citizens have any need to encrypt their email?
What if everyone believed that law-abiding citizens should use postcards for their mail? If a nonconformist tried to assert his privacy by using an envelope for his mail, it would draw suspicion. Perhaps the authorities would open his mail to see what he's hiding. Fortunately, we don't live in that kind of world, because everyone protects most of their mail with envelopes. So no one draws suspicion by asserting their privacy with an envelope. There's safety in numbers. Analogously, it would be nice if everyone routinely used encryption for all their email, innocent or not, so that no one drew suspicion by asserting their email privacy with encryption. Think of it as a form of solidarity.
Senate Bill 266, a 1991 omnibus anticrime bill, had an unsettling measure buried in it. If this non-binding resolution had become real law, it would have forced manufacturers of secure communications equipment to insert special "trap doors" in their products, so that the government could read anyone's encrypted messages. It reads, "It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications services and manufacturers of electronic communications se
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
That's nice for you, but I wouldn't trade my privacy in silly conversations for the (illusion of) safety in America. Neither would a lot of other people. The problem is, you can't just trade your privacy by endorsing wiretaps. You're trading everyone's privacy. Perhaps you'd like to write a letter allowing the government to listen to all the conversations they want, read your emails, and rifle through your files, but don't speak for the rest of the country.
The whole point of the article is that the FBI does not want to actually do the tapping. They want Vonage, Packet8, etc. to do the tapping for them.
If you're using IP-to-IP VoIP instead, the FBI will just use Carnivore.
If you're using crypto, the FBI will just break into your house/office and backdoor your computer.
Maybe I'm calling my doctor about a health problem I don't care anyone else to know about (rash? std? hemmrhoids?), or I'm feeling lonely and decide to call up a phone sex company, or I'm on the phone with a significant other talking about private matters, etc.
There are plenty of topics I could be chatting about on the phone that have zero sinister/criminal element but are extremely personal and undesirable to have eavesdroppers.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Which is exactly why the whole thing is silly. Do people really make unsolicited phone calls to discuss their criminal intentions with strangers, or do they usually only discuss these things with people they already know well, and thus are capable of distributing 1024-bit keys to before hand? Last time I checked, Al Queda wasn't using cold-calling to recruit new suicide bombers...
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
This would, of course, be a terrific argument in my mind, to just get over ourselves and find a better way to deal with drugs; i.e. make them legal in such a way so that people can have a good time and not pose too much of a threat to society (such as the laws pertaining to alcohol). 'Course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
What makes you think that Uncle Sam is going to listen to "everything you do"? Remember, this law doesn't give the gov't carte blanche to listen to the conversations of anyone it chooses to. It must show a court of law that there is sufficient reason that you are using the phone lines to commit a felony. All this law does is put VoIP on the same legal standing as traditional phone lines, with regards to wiretapping.
Equating the gov't trying to stop the illegal actions of mobsters and drug dealers with a police state is pointless hyperbole. There may be issues with wiretapping laws, but your posting certainly doesn't convince me. If there is anything wrong with this statute you'll have to find a better arguement.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Note that this article of the consitution does not say no searches and seizures. Just unreasonable ones. The courts have determined that with probable cause (and your definition is wrong, btw) a telephone may be tapped.
Oh, and also, the Tenth comes to mind here.. nowhere in the Constitution is the Federal Government granted the right to tap telephones, therefore they don't have it.
Yes, because clearly the Founding Fathers hated it when the British would tap their telephones....
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
I'm not saying legalize everything, just treat addiction to hard drugs as a medical issue and let medical doctors prescribe for maintance while helping their patients. Marijuana (something much safer than alcohol) needs to be legalized and taxed.
Get the facts about marijuana. End the drug war now.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
One wonders then how it is they were able to deal with crime before the advent of technology.
For instance, at the rate we're going, I fully expect to see laws against two people conversing face-to-face and in private in my lifetime. It seems to me that every argument for intrusive wiretapping technologies applies equally well to a conversation held on, say, a beach somewhere.
By the way, I hate to say it, but your faith in law enforcement following the rules here, e.g., disconnecting after realizing the call isn't germane to their investigation, is positively retro. A day doesn't pass that doesn't seen yet another law enforcement officer exposed as being corrupt.
Power corrupts you know.
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
Future headline: "MAE-East and MAE-West routers begin dropping ``UnTrusted'' packets; wireless traffic at all time high"
--
Power to the Peaceful
It's not the easiest program to use, but it does work well. It's development has been discontinued, but you can still get the source code if you get it quickly. I'd like very much to see someone pick up its development, or to at least use its technology in a new program.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
It might not matter to me if I _didn't_ keep a low profile. When I'm informed that something _can_ happen, my first question is "Yes, but how _likely_ is it?" In the case of being listened in on in a VoIP wiretap, my conclusion is "Not very".
My stronger concern is a bit more fundamental. There's a strong push for broader police powers to cope with a perceived terrorist threat. That's very nice, but at some point, the threat of terror will abate. Then what?
In business, you win the game by showing a better bottom line than last year. In government, you win the game by being able to request a bigger budget and more staff next budget period.
Law enforcement agencies are bureaucracies. NO bureaucracy ever willingly gives up something once it gets it, and no police agency will willingly give up increased powers once they are given, even if there is no need for those powers.
There have already been enough occurances of government officials making fusses over one thing or another, simply to justify thier existance. I expect to see more than a few by law enforcement for the same reason.
I'm not worried about Voice over IP wiretaps per se. I _am_ worried about a trend towards increased police powers without a corresponding increase in oversight to insure they are properly used.
As for ending the war on drugs, nice thought, but how do you suggest it be done? I've thought on occasion that simply making drug use legal would solve a lot of problems. I don't especially care what other people do to feel good. And if some of those things get them killed by overdose or the like, hey, it's not like they didn't know it could happen.
I _would_ get positively draconian about injuries to _other_ people when someone was high. The same stuff you shouldn't do while drunk, you probably shouldn't do while high, and if you do it and someone is hurt or killed because you were impaired, the world _should_ fall in on you.
______
Dennis
For example, I have heard from former PacBell CO technicians that the wiretap and pen trace rate in the Los Angeles area is staggeringly high -- in some offices, upwards of 10% of the circuits have some sort of "tap" installed (From a remote terminal, a tap looked the same as a simple trace device that only records the number dialed, not the voice traffic on the line).
Unless of course the reason there is a tap on your line is not to produce admissable criminal evidence, but because you (or the line) a politcal activist, a nosy reporter, associated with an unpopular political organization, or just chose to support the wrong candidate in the last election... If you want to know more about government abuse of wiretaps (and increase the likelyhood of being the subject of a wiretap yourself), just do a little research into the past and present of communications intercepts and abuse by the public and private sector -- COINTELPRO, CALEA, RISSNET, MAGLOCLEN, IN-Q-TEL, Takefuji, DSC1000.Or just pick up a newspaper and read about the neverending stream of FBI bugging devices found in Philadelphia over the past three months...
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.