Groups Slam FCC on Internet Phone Tap Rule

kamikaze-Tech writes "An Associated Press report posted in the Vonage VoIP Forums discusses the new CALEA regulations that will make it easier for law enforcement to tap Internet phone calls. The article claims that the new law will also make computer systems more vulnerable to hackers, according to some digital privacy and civil liberties groups. While the groups don't want the Internet to be a safe haven for terrorists and criminals, they complain that expanding wiretapping laws to cover Internet calls -- or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) -- will create additional points of attack and security holes that hackers can exploit. VoIP service providers such as Vonage, Skype and Packet 8 have eighteen months to comply with the new law."

Comments

Is Skype accountable to the FCC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that Skype's corporate entity isn't located in the States, it would seem that the FCC doesn't have any control over it.

Re:Is Skype accountable to the FCC?

[dnoyeb]

if they connect to any US numbers, there quality will suck without us servers. Plus most of the numbers connected to will be landlines and you can bet the local phone company will jump with joy when asked to find a way to disconnect the VOIP provider.

It's so much worse..

[Ckwop]

The article claims that the new law will also make computer systems more vulnerable to hackers, according to some digital privacy and civil liberties groups.

Oh it's a whole metric-fuckton worse than that. The problem the FCC, FBI (insert your favourite alphabet agency here) is that they make the assumption that the criminals that will be using VOIP will COMPLY with FCC.

Voice/IP isn't like traditional the traditional telephone system at all. I can't install my own private telephone network with encrypted lines but with V/IP this is fairly easy to achieve. What's worse, what criminal is really going to open up their private P2P telephone so the government can tap them?

So the measure has absolutely no effect on our ability to catch criminals. Instead we subject the communication of ordinary law abiding citizens to the possibility of them having their perfectly legitimate conversations compromised, be it by a l33t|st or corupt police officers alike.

Simon.

Re:It's so much worse..

[MattWhitworth]

Agreed. If you've got something big to plan, you don't use an unsecured public medium (criminals and terrrorists have learnt that it's possible to track down your position from a mobile phone call. A Chechen leader was assasinated in this way, and it's how the Madrid bombers were traced).

How does the FCC think it will be able to tap an 128-bit RSA-encrypted private protocol? It can't, and the overwhelming majority of phone taps will be of law-abiding citizens. But that's the way the world works. Just look at DRM

In short, terrorists/criminals/enemies of the state aren't stupid.

Re:It's so much worse..

[Motherfucking Shit]

Oh it's a whole metric-fuckton worse than that. The problem the FCC, FBI (insert your favourite alphabet agency here) is that they make the assumption that the criminals that will be using VOIP will COMPLY with FCC.

And it gets worse yet. Essentially, all "anti-terrorism," "anti-drug," etc. laws are useless for the purpose for which they're supposedly enacted. Terrorists, drug dealers, and other criminals are, by their very nature, breaking the law. Making their tangential activities (like communicating, meeting, transferring funds...) illegal isn't going to stop them!

In short, attempts to legislate terrorism out of existance are doomed from the start and should be suspect. You can damned well bet that lawmakers are smart enough to know that these laws aren't going to do anything to stop the Bogeyman of the day. They're being passed as "feel good" measures at best, and as attempts to control the law-abiding population at worse.

Making it illegal to carry cigarette lighters onto airplanes doesn't stop a terrorist; a terrorist would find a way to bring an incendiary onboard anyway. Making it illegal to have an untappable VoIP connection doesn't stop a terrorist, either; a terrorist would just setup stunnel or pgpFone end-to-end and chat away.

Sigh. Someday, the United States Congress will be comprised of people who grew up understanding technology...

Re:It's so much worse..

[andreMA]

Someday, the United States Congress will be comprised of people who grew up understanding technology

Don't bet the farm on that.

Re:It's so much worse..

[Bloke down the pub]

If you've got something big to plan, you plainly *do* use an unsecured public medium. You admit yourself that a Chechen leader was assassinated this way, and it's how the Madrid bombers were traced.

That's not a case of they *do*. It's a case of they *did*. The others, assuming they aren't stupid, have probably wised up by now.

Most criminals aren't IT experts. If they were all that clever, they would have regular well-paid jobs and wouldn't need to turn to a life of crime.

Did the directors of Enron need to turn to crime? What about Nick Leeson? And IIRC, OBL has a degree in engineering. How's the "criminal = poor and stupid" theory now?

Re:It's so much worse..

[Threni]

> The problem the FCC, FBI (insert your favourite alphabet agency here) is that
> they make the assumption that the criminals that will be using VOIP will COMPLY
> with FCC.

No, they're relying on the fact that if you have the ability to wiretap data conveyed by companies which provide internet access but not ordinary phone calls then you can keep tabs on criminals who are using VOIP using that company.

> So the measure has absolutely no effect on our ability to catch criminals.

Wrong - every last byte the criminals transmit will be grabbable by the FBI for analysis.

Furthermore, there is absolutely no chance whatsoever that this will be defeated in the long run. The police/FBI *will* legally be able to monitor all communication, it's really as simple as that, as there is no public will to allow people to communicate free from such observation.

Re:It's so much worse..

[dnoyeb]

But you kind of proved the other point with your examples don't you think?

We keep saying that real criminals wouldn't do this, but somehow they seem to keep doing it. So I suppose we can catch the stupid criminals, and the ones we want to frame.

Re:It's so much worse..

[kilodelta]

Not to mention that in large part, mainstream VoIP is nothing but a last mile technology. The call still lands on a public switch near you.

In my case I use Vonage. They make the IP connection to PaeTec's switch in my city and from there the call hits the PSTN. I used that very scenario to push the local PUC into forcing Verizon to port my number faster because it was in fact a regulated to regulate port.

I've confirmed all of my suspicions with both Vonage, PaeTec and Verizon folks that I know and sure enough I got it right.

Law enforcement has had the ability to silently tap lines since the advent of digital switching. I recall when a new #5 ESS was installed in a local community a friend gave us a private tour of the facility. You could sit at the console, bring up a phone number and listen in.
>
From that I can estimate that it is trivial for the ALGA (Acronym Loving Government Agencies) to listen in on your line. In most cases it takes nothing more in the case of VoIP than finding the wire you pulled from the NID and tapping onto that. The more elegant solution is to mirror your conversations to a line hooked into the local PD. Better yet, record it.

We're living in a police state but the police are by and large clueless.

Re:It's so much worse..

[DavidTC]

So we'll just Darwin out all the stupid terrorists and assassins.

Sounds like a plan to me. A fucking stupid one.

People are always going to have untappable means of communication. Untappable because they actually cannot be tapped (Strong encryption, people carrying messages by hand.) or just that no one can find out where they are. (Calls between two disposible cell phones, message drops.)

Tapping phones works fine for catching normal criminals. That's because if you know who a criminal is, you can just follow him around anyway until he commits a crime. While criminals are caught using phone taps, very few of them are discovered using phone taps, and in fact that makes no sense. At best, they merely 'spread' one known suspect onto five known guilty parties. Which is good, but doesn't work if we don'thave one suspect to start with.

And we don't know who are planning 'big plans', and we don't know what they're planning. Yes, sometimes we get very lucky and randomly intercept a big plan while doing a tap for some other reason, but that is not a 'success' of a phone tap, it is arguable a 'failure', because we were tapping converstations that weren't relevant to what we were looking for.

Or what?

[el_womble]

Dear Skype, We, the FCC, require you, a British company, to comply with American laws. If you don't we'll... say Ni! in your general direction. Your Friends The FCC Seriously, they're already giving away free phone calls, and free software from a foriegn country, using foreign servers. The best the FCC can hope for is that they put a line on their download page: Dear American, please don't download our software cause it will upset the FCC and the Feds. Failure to comply will mean that those in charge will think you are a terrorist. You don't want people to think your a terrosit do you? Vonage... well they're pretending to be a phone company, so they might have some luck.

Yes! We got those pesky terrorists at last!

[mrRay720]

I mean, they'll never find a way around this, right?

All I can say is thank god that the technology doesn't exist to communicate over voice outside of the phone and VoIP channels.

You know, if anyone ever figures out how to do direct PC-to-PC voice service, or if an IM service such as Yahoo ever include voice in their client, we'll all be doomed!

Wait a minute... they could be emailing each other right now! They could be talking to each other on IRC right now, or in a chat room, or through Yahoo messenger, or through MSN messenger, or through....

Yikes. I never realised how much danger we are all in. SOMEONE BLOW UP THE INTERNET NOW!!!!!!1!!!1oneone

calea is for telecom.but FCC just reclassified net

[plasmacutter]

The FCC just reclassified broadband as an "information service".

Calea is supposed to apply to telecom.

I sense some cognitive dissonance here, or maybe a simple hyppocritical abuse of power?

BTW.. calea is not a new law, and the rule itself is not a "law" it's a regulation. There are subtle differences.

Re:Why should the Feds get their own backdoor?

[Bimo_Dude]

I have nothing to hide, but what I do is NONE OF THEIR FUCKING BUSINESS.

Period.

Rephrased for proper effect

[Anonymous Coward]

"If you've got nothing to hide then you shouldn't have any objection to select government agencies/individuals listening to your conversations."

If you're making fun of that line, you've got to go a little further; the way you state it is exactly the way the serious supporters of surveillance state it.

E.g.:

If you've got nothing to hide then you shouldn't have any objection to select government agencies/individuals listening to what you whisper in your lover's ear. On the other hand, if you're a member of Al Queda, I could see why you might have a problem with this idea.

If you've got nothing to hide then you shouldn't have any objection to select government agencies/individuals placing cameras in your shower. On the other hand, if you're a member of Al Queda, I could see why you might have a problem with this idea.

If you've got nothing to hide then you shouldn't have any objection to select government agencies/individuals reading your thoughts. On the other hand, if you're a member of Al Queda, I could see why you might have a problem with this idea.

Re: Someone blow up the internet

[Tune]

Your point is so true. Of course providing a wiretap service through VoIP is a waste of money. Actually, it is more likely to provide malicious hackers with private info of the good guys, than it is going to help intelligence catch the bad guys. (For example, eavedropping random phone conversations is relatively easy access to credit card numbers.) Meanwhile, terrorists could use onion routing/tor networks to communicate virtually untraceble.

The only way to tap on *every* conversation is to kindly ask *everyone* to install the spyware on *every* computer and never turn it off. Did I say "ask kindly"? Make than "mandate".

Now what do we need for the population to accept that? Call it fear, uncertainty and doubt. Stories about pirates. Stories about violence. Stories about war and terrorism.

Hello Nineteen Eighty-Four.

--
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards -- Aldous Huxley

Re: Someone blow up the internet

[mrRay720]

The sad thing is that I genuinely believe that a headline of "Pedohphiles use phones. We need to tap your phone to stop pedophiles." Would easily get 20% of people agreeing.

I guess that the general population just get what they deserve, and the rest of us have to suffer along with them.