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VoIP Wiretapping
pisqon writes "VoIP News has an article discussing a U.S. government decision that will extend wiretapping regulations to the Internet. From the article: 'The Federal Communications Commission voted 5-0 last week to prohibit businesses from offering broadband or Internet phone service unless they provide police with backdoors for wiretapping access. Formal regulations are expected by early next year.'" Update: 03/28 04:52 GMT by Z : As several readers have pointed out, this story is a mite out of date. Good conversation in the comments, though.
As long as wireteps for VOIP phones fall under the regulations for wiretaps on normal phones, I don't see any reason that it shouldn't be allowed. Otherwise VIOP will be seen as a haven for criminals trying to circumvent weiretaps instead of a legitimate technology
Don't you hate pants?
Being that VoIP originates from the callers machine digitally, it would be easy to add encryption to the transmission. Please comment, do any current VoIP services clients or other free/open-source clients already offer this feature?
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
At least we can all rest safely knowing that there's no way "bad guys" could utilize the same provisions to listen in on personal conversations over IP!
I can understand requiring backdoors to VoIP telephones, but to the internet and instant messaging clients too? Pretty soon good old fasioned postal service will be the only way to truly privately communicate. They can't open personal letters, can they?
What about netmeeting and other such protocols for voice/video over IP? would these be affected by these new laws?
Remember the "can't export crypto technology" era?
Those who did their crypto development outside USA
were exempt from the restriction (mostly), ie,
since they wouldn't have to export code in an
electronic form.
Perhaps software-only VoIP systems like Skype
will be exempt from the FCC's "must provide a
backdoor" ruling.
Has Skype made any statement on its position?
Personally, I don't have a problem with the security thing. It's just for the police, and I personally don't have anything to hide from them. If it makes our country safer, sure, but the bulleted list in the article is a bunch of good points. Some of which I highlight below: Your request to the FCC said that broadband and VoIP companies may raise prices to "recover their CALEA implementation costs from their customers." How do you square higher prices with President Bush's speech in March calling for "affordable broadband" for all Americans? Congress gave telephone companies $500 million to buy new equipment to comply with CALEA. Why should Internet companies not receive the same treatment? Is it because Verizon, SBC and the other former Bells have well-connected lobbying outposts in Washington, D.C.--but Vonage, 8x8 and other VoIP start-ups do not? Don't get me wrong, I'd prefer a secure form of encryption, and I'd want to be sure that only the authorities have such access (like via the ISP directly?), but I'm not opposed to wiretaps, I'm just looking for equity and consistency.
Date: August 9, 2004
Why is this "news"?
http://fudge.org
as soon as the VOIP software offers encrpytion plugins on both side of the line, wiretapping is just as feasable as reading encrypted email or viewing ssh-terminal sessions...
this won't work... the most likely thing that will happen is that the service providers will leave the country. Or worse, that companies outside will be more competitive and push local companies out of the market.
What's to prevent a company in India from making this software for willing costumers to use?
______________________________________________
sigamajig...
Does this mean that protocols supporting (or requiring) strong encryption are basically forbidden by that, since there's no way they could be wiretapped?
Mandatory backdoors in software... Looks like I will be buying some Microsoft stock.
keep that finger in that leaking dyke, we wouldnt want all the water to rush out
ever think the "bad guys" are the people listening not the people talking ? whatever USA can tap all they like the bad guys will just use any number of public encryption methods to talk, you would think the gov would realize this, but "intelligence" isn't something they seem to be blessed with
But maybe there is more to it?
Congress gave telephone companies $500 million to buy new equipment to comply with CALEA. Why should Internet companies not receive the same treatment? Is it because Verizon, SBC and the other former Bells have well-connected lobbying outposts in Washington, D.C.--but Vonage, 8x8 and other VoIP start-ups do not?
According to the article, congress gave telcom companies $500,000,000 to enforce the laws they passed? Why doesn't the government give me money to enforce their pollution laws, so I can get my car fixed up. Instead I have to pay to comply with the law.
People must be aware they are giving something up here. They are giving away freedom. What if some day comes, when a David Duke wins the white house? Congress is filled with people who vote along lobbyist lines. And we end up with laws that remove our consitutional rights- like having police wiretap without a warrent or snoop around the library to see what we are reading. What if they take away our 2nd amendment rights, first by requiring registration, than banning assult style wepons, then slowly, state by state, taking away wepons you already own. What if the states decide to put up a camera on every street corner.... then one day in your house.
The point is the founding fathers did not add the Bill or Rights because it sounded like a nice set of rights. They added those Rights so the people could fight an overbearing government if the need ever came. What if England had decided the colony could not have any guns, and decided that neighbors must report what other neighbors say. We would not be a country today, we would be English. The founding fathers gave people certain Rights to make sure we stay free.
Those that give away those Rights are comminting suicide for the rest of us. They are chaining us all. Rossoue was right "Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains". People, don't give you your rights!
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Personally, I don't have a problem with the security thing. It's just for the police, and I personally don't have anything to hide from them.
The USA is not designed to have a transparent citizenship. The USA was designed for government to be transparent. Everything our founding fathers did was designed for maximum personal freedom, maximum personal privacy, and to minimize the chance of government curruption. And over the past 20 years, under republican control, we have lost many rights your grandparents took for granted.
During WWII we locked up anyone who had slanted eyes because they *might* sympathize with the enemy. We tried countless times to kill Casto. We assasinated the head of state of Chili. Lets face it, the USA does not have a good history when it comes to human rights. Whenever someone with money thinks someone without money is a threat, the powers that be make life a living hell on everyone.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
One could always use two VOIP providers. Call on one, have the other party call back on a second VOIP, and run two simultaneous half-duplex conversations. VOIP 1 would handle voice from A to B and VOIP 2 would handle B to A. Unless the wire tap is on the ISP (and the feds can merge the two separate streams) they would only get to listen to half the conversation.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
They can't open personal letters, can they?
Sure they can. A warrant is a temporary suspension of your normal rights, after having proven reasonable suspicion to a court of law. If you're going to quote me the amendment, it is unlawful search and seizure. As long as they go through the proper channels, they can know what toothpaste you use, and how many condoms are left in your bedroom drawer. [Bad geek joke] For anyone here, that means all of them [/joke]
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
LE needs to face up to the fact that their job is going to get harder, and there's just nothing they can do about it. Either they'll have to intercept communications by other-than-remote means (i.e. break into someone's house and install a bug), or socially engineer around crypto, or just somehow gather evidence about crimes by means completely different than intercepting communication.
It's a shame. There are probably legitimate uses for wiretapping, where it can be used to obtain information about actual crimes. But so much goodwill has been squandered (e.g. the drug war, etc) that I doubt many people will care about the loss of this tool. The terrorist angle probably helps a little, but people are getting pretty jaded about that too.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
For pure IP telephony, though, the obvious way to wiretap is to tweak the call setup, so instead of the voice channel going from Alice to Bob, there are two voice channels, from Alice-to-KGB and KGB-to-Bob. Even if there's end-to-end encryption on the voice channel (which is sadly lacking in too many implementations), that doesn't stop the wiretap from working, because the KGB is an endpoint and has the key. If you have an adequate public key infrastructure, you can prevent this by authenticating the call setup messages. But if you don't have that, you're toast; in some cases you can use SSH-like "remember the signature key they used last time" protocols, or you can read your Diffie-Hellman authentication message over the phone if you recognize the other person's voice, but for tricks like that, your VOIP software needs to give you visibility into and ideally control over that process.
So regulatable VOIP service providers, who handle the database lookup portion of calls in countries with wiretap-greedy spooks, may be forced to pay extra to develop wiretap-friendly control software. An intermediate step, which the FBI has been all too successfull in getting US regulators to approve, is to get visibility into the call setup process, similar to old-fashioned pen registers, so they at least know who's talking to whom, and can often get that from the telcos without a formal warrant, using some less-stringent process like an administrative subpoena, and often with gag orders forbidding the telco to tell the wiretap victim.
That's a big problem with closed applications such as Skype, by the way - even if they use some good crypto algorithms, which they say they do, you can't tell what they're doing with them, and whether they're leaking authentication information. (Too bad, because they're a non-US provider who might be harder to bully, at least if they build some corporate separation between their software developers and their VOIP-to-Telco service providers, which I'm not sure if they have.)
Asterisk is open-source, which has the advantage that you can see if something like that is built in, and also has the advantage that it's usually operated by end-users, not by service providers. The SIP protocol family is designed to support proxies and indirection which are useful in building services where some bits are managed by one entity and some by another, e.g. PBXs at both ends, a directory service provider or two in the middle, maybe some voicemail providers or conferencing servers or whatever - it's a big step up from the old H.323 protocols, which pretty much required building closed systems.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
backdoor installation option:
check [ ] to install the FBI backdoor,
check [ ] to install the EU backdoor,
check [ ] to install the Mossad backdoor,
check [ ] to install the Osama backdoor, or
check [ ] to install self compiled open source VoiP software without backdoors.
Privacy is terrorism.
On an install of Mepis some months ago, I found skype installed and set up. I believed then as I do now that if the Mepis developer or developers were getting any commission or compensation for providing a fully working skype setup by default, then it was a good thing as distro developers need all the support they can get. But some time last year when skype was hitting
One of the problems I continually run into in trusting skype is that the source code is not open. Skype hit upon a winner, and good for them. I'm not expecting them to make source code available so competitors can copy them and then compete. Or so end users may get some advantage by getting the source.
But when it comes to encryption, encryption products or services live or die by peer review. Other products have been shown to be faulty and insecure after peer review by professionals in the encryption field finding faults in the design or implementation or both. With skype, the only way to verify that their design and implementation of encryption is secure is by permitting other professionals in the encryption field to peer review the design and implementation. This would require their viewing of some or all of the source code for the client or end user app. Otherwise, at no point in time should anyone consider using skype for even normal conversations, since most people include financial or banking details, or other sensitive information while conducting personal telephone calls due to the more likely requirement for physical presence requirements for a telephone tap.
One of the downsides of telecoms jumping in on the voip bandwagon is that eventually enough people will be using non-secure voip that a threshold will be reached where the courts decide that no one should have a reasonable expectation of privacy during any call, and thus lowering the bar to the level of cordless phones and permissible interception and recording of such calls.
Skype may have a great service. From what I've read in the recent past about the number of new downloads of the client, Skype has a really great service. But one shouldn't expect any privacy at all, or that Skype can substitute for a land line phone in terms of permissible intercepting (and presence requirements for land lines) unless Skype opens up at least the encryption portion and someone like Zimmerman and others peer review the service and then announce that there is no reason for concern
I look forward to the time that we have end-to-end encryption just like we have (so far) end to end encryption with SSH, SSL, and similar technologies. I also look forward to seeing a report on Skype by Zimmerman and other peer reviewers. Until then, "trust us" is not enough for me, although Skype may be the service that escapes regulation and paves the way for future secure conversations. And if that happens, thanks Skype.
If there is a backdoor in VOIP, what is to stop vonage employees from listening in and recording conversations for their own shits and giggles?
How long before some 14 year old genius hacker discovers the VOIP backdoors and exploits and records converstations and posts them on the net to make a point?
There is a reason why network security exists... Its not perfect... but without it... we're in a world of shit.
And now our government wants us to install backdoors in everthing we use on the net? So much for security.
When every advance in technology carries a government-imposed requirement that the police must not be hampered in any way, that is what you call a police state. The police - law enforcement agencies - have enough power already to do their jobs effectively.
Privacy is not the diametric to freedom, it is a freedom.
Privacy is the freedom to control access to information about yourself and your behavior from those who you would rather not know it because it is embarrassing, incriminating, or simply against your wishes.
Freedom is not synonymous with an open society either, in fact an fully open society is the least free (libre) arrangement of human interaction because there isn't any haven from the will of others to impose themselves or their ideas upon you. No thought may go unchecked by the group, no dream unconfirmed to the mores of the society at large.
You cleave to the idea that there is the 'truly moral' while simultaneously evoking that the 'government is us', which I find a little silly.
If the government is in fact 'us', then the tyranny of the mass is reason enough to demand and safeguard our privacy, and insist on something less than an fully open society.
If there is a 'truly moral' way of living, then there cannot be a government of the people, for the people, and by the people because it would imply either that this moral truth is known by people, thereby rendering moot the need for government at all, or that in the absence of this knowledge personally, the collective acts of a nation can be somehow conformed to a superior standard of conduct, which betrays the notion that the people are self-governing, since they do not possess the knowledge of the moral truth themselves and are instead being governed by the ideology that is external to them.
It is a logical fallacy that we are somehow "safe" from a sub-set of the population that is opposed to a particular behavior or belief and is empowered to act with authority to eliminate that behavior.
There is an enormous difference between what is moral and what is legal. Legality is the thing of government and of power. Morality is the thing of humanity and of ethics.
What is criminal today can overnight become legal, and vice versa, simply by the caprice of a majority of 538 human beings in the District of Columbia. That isn't a complaint, it is a fact. To live under the illusion that you aren't potentially a target of someone's bias, prejudice, or ideological action is really pretty foolish.
I'm sure that few people in the Arab-American or American-Islamic communities realized they would become the enemy, subject to seizure, torture, imprisonment without charge, and social stigma simply for the way the looked, who they spent time with, the books they read, or the location of their religious centers on September 10th 2001. They likely felt just as most Japanese-Americans did on December 6th 1941.
Just because what you do is "what everyone is doing" doesn't make it morally OK. It makes it popular. It was popular to ignore the Nazi rise to power and the lynchings in the deep south and the Inquisition, too. None of those are considered morally OK. Morality, when viewed through the lens of history, generally is the opposition to power being abused, not the tacit acquiescence to brutality.
Living a life shrouded in secrecy isn't an un-free life if you are doing it because you choose not to share the intimate details of your life, not because you have to. Living a life under surveillance and scrutiny by anonymous actors who believe they are above reproach and constantly on the lookout for any small breech of one of a myriad of civil and criminal laws that no one can abide by is not freedom. When everything is a crime and the enforcers pick and choose to whom and when the law will apply, that is not government by the people. When you think that what you are doing is truly morally OK, and that the government will never think you aren't, you are living a life that is not free.
Want to read my stuff? Go ahead and crack it - no warrant necessary.
Get the rabbit installed on a machine behind your firewall
==> http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
Faster than freenet
==> http://www.i2p.net/
Encrypt Jabber
==> http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/Jabber/jabberd.html
Onion Routing
==> http://tor.eff.org/
Emerging Network To Reduce Orwellian Potency Yield
==> http://entropy.stop1984.com/
Free Internet telephony
==> http://skype.com/
GNU-ified P2p
==> http://www.gnu.org/software/gnunet/
DO NOT DENY yourself about 2 hours @ InfoAnarchy.org
OMG! ==> http://www.infoanarchy.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Pag e
LearnLearnLearnLearn ==> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptography
=================EMAIL ENCRYPTION===============
GPG (Free PGP)
==> http://gnupg.org/
Integrated with Thunderbird
==> http://enigmail.mozdev.org/
Mutt can't be beat as a mailreader and integrates GPG wonderfully.
==> http://mutt.blackfish.org.uk/
==> http://www.mutt.org/links.html
==> http://wiki.mutt.org/index.cgi?UserPages
!!! Please do not immediately send newly created keys to the keyservers (as many HOWTOs instruct new users to). They are already overflowing with "test keys" and other people's experiments from over the years THAT HAVE NO EXPIRATION and will never be deleted. These keys are "orphans" and most will never be used. As keyservers sync together, and most keys are never deleted once submitted - GET YOUR KEY SETUP CORRECTLY AND HAVE PRACTICE WITH IT BEFORE SENDING IT OFF TO THE KEYSERVERS!!! Otherwise storage requirements will continue to grow and using these in the future will become more difficult FOR ALL. Please, if you are just starting out with PGP or GPG or GnuPG or anything similar (the last two are in fact the same thing) use manual key distribution to begin (ascii armor your public key with
$ gpg --export --armor my@email.address.org
and copy and paste it into an email body or attach it to an email
$ gpg --export --armor my@email.address.org > myPubKey.txt
to gain practice with GPG before uploading your key. This way if you need to create another you won't have uploaded your mistakes. Many choices need to be made and it's worth getting things right before "going public" with your new digital ID. Experiment with yourself and a few different email accounts or with some friends first.)
SET AN EXPIRATION OF 2-5 YEARS OR SO AND MAKE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR PREFERENCES THE WAY YOU LIKE THEM BEFORE SENDING TO A KEYSERVER! Better yet is to HOST YOUR KEY ON YOUR WEBSITE (or try using http://biglumber.com/ instead to host your key and help c
We need secure VoIP!
SIP telephony is similar to HTTP. It's ordinarily unencrypted. But it can be tunnelled through any secure connection. Since there are open-source SIP clients in existence, it ought to be trivial to create a secure SIP using openSSL or some other cryptography library. It also ought to be possible to create a similar secure version of the IAX protocol {Inter-Asterisk eXchange} for when you have hardware SIP phones: use SIP from phone to PC running Asterisk, and S-IAX to the next link in the chain.
Depending upon the protocol, you would either use permanent public and private key pairs per person, or temporary session keys. Exchange of used session keys would give plausible deniability {since nobody can prove your correspondent didn't have the encrypting key when you sent them the message; so it might be total bollocks that they made up for reasons that don't concern you}.
Besides getting around Big Brother and the surveillance state, this sort of thing will also be useful in jurisdictions where governments are trying to ban VOIP altogether.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!