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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."
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.
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.
If they want to tap VoIP, they should have to hack it like everyone else.
Isn't that the same CALEA law that also forces router/NIC makers to install FBI backdoors (which can also be compromised by hackers)?
I see a big market soon for do-it-yourself NICs and PC routers...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I don't mind phone tapping at all - as long is there is cause for it's need. However as stated in another posting it is kinda stupid, as if people want to communicate over the net for dodgy dealings, they are certainly not going to use one of the mainstream (or indeed, any) VOIP provider.
If only the UK was able to procecute criminals based on phone tapping, currently it's not allowed (hears gasps of shock).
I can't help but wonder what will happen when someone uses one of these "mandated" security weak points to impair service from one of the larger providers, like Vonage. If the government was warned that it would be a likely outcome of their new law, are they liable for the damages?
Even worse, sniffable (tapable, whatever) by the government means sniffable by a lot of far more clever black-hats. Who is liable for the damages incurred by identity theft? Or are we just never supposed to order anything over the phone again?
I guess 18 months from now it's back to the cell phone only existance for me....
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.
Scared of flying, pointy things snce 1979!
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
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.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Well yes, but to be fair to Microsoft they weren't intentional backdoors.
"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.
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
Some hacker will graft PGP-style encryption onto SIP. You will simply send your public key in the headers -- it's called Session Initiation Protocol for a reason don'tcha know -- and the far end will encrypt against it. If anybody is listening in, they won't be able to decrypt it. Even better, you wait for sometime after the information has lost its value and publish the private key. Now nobody can even prove you really were the intended recipient.
All the tools required to do this are already available as open source, so it will be an interesting exercise for somebody.
And it will have the beneficial side-effect of killing off SKYPE. Another closed protocol bites the dust, good riddance.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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.
Correct me if I'm wrong but aren't there simple commercial products like Niksun Netdetector that can simply reconstruct VOIP traffic from an Ethereal dump collected by simply by snooping the wire? Is this calling for new technology to collect the traffic or is this saying we want the magic black boxes at every provider to provide an instant tap anytime/anywhere...
News Reporters Make Tasty Polar Bear Treats!
Sometimes I'm happy that the ACLU et al are looking out for me, sometimes they pick the wrong fight. This is exactly one of them. Oh, packet 8 and vonage have 18 months to allow wire tapping? Guess what guys, they already have it. Vonage uses Silantro, its had calea support for at least the last 3 years. Broadworks (the Broadsoft softswitch) has calea as well. The large softswitch vendors all already support it, I think Asterisk even might (although I'm not sure). These things aren't going to make the "Internet more vulnerable to hackers".
Has the ACLU setup CALEA on these systems? I highly doubt it, but I have. At least with broadsoft it is a trivial matter to keep the softswitch entirely firewalled off the internet that unless someone finds a buffer overflow in the sip protocol or rtp protocol that the system is using there is no opportunity for a hacker to get in.
Furthermore, the system supporting CALEA doesn't increase the risk.. IE if someone hacks the SIP protocol stack on a softswitch and takes control of it, well who cares if the box supports CALEA they just got access to all the phonecalls going through that box.
Do you really thing that up til now the FBI et al has had no power to wire tap a VoIP phone? That more than 5 million people in the US are totally able to break whatever law they want (wire fraud, telemarketing scams, plan bank robberies, etc) notice I didn't mention terrorism, just because they have Vonage? Right.
I've followed about 4 or 5 links to see exactly what verse they're referring to with comments, and every one they've twisted to make it say what they want it to say, then said "See?! The Bible can't be right, because it says to !!"
Genesis 24:2-3,9 : Grope sexual organs of one swearing oaths
Read the text. Putting a hand under a thigh is hardly "groping sexual organs". Putting it on top of the thigh would be closer to what they describe it as. Besides, I think this was a cultural thing. Nowadays we shake hands on a deal, they would do this. It's probably rooted in something like holding the person there until the deal is done, and they've sworn their promise to you.
Genesis 25:1-6 : Keeping mistresses is not adultery.
Again, read the text. Nowhere does it say that keeping mistresses is not adultery. It says Abraham had them. It doesn't say whether this was a good or bad thing. It does show that Abraham was human, and subject to the same character flaws as we are.
Genesis 39:7-14 : Woman tries to rape man.
So? What's the point? Have you never seen a demanding woman who happens to want sex? She wanted to have sex with him, and he didn't want to. As geeks, I know this is hard for us to understand, but there are aggressive women out there, who pursue men in this way.
Genesis 47:29 : Joseph ordered to "feel-up" his father.
Jacob didn't want to be buried in Egypt, which was a foreign land. He wanted to be buried at home. So he made his son swear that his body would be taken and buried with his ancestors, using the customary "handshake" of the time. Nowhere does it say "Jacob order Joseph to stroke his dick and promise to take him out of Egypt."
Exodus 12:29 : God kills all first-born babies in Egypt
Egypt at the time was an extremely sinful nation in God's eyes. Children were being brought up in slavery, sex orgies were common, and people were beheaded, stoned or worse, just for saying "No" to the emperor. (Kinda makes Bush Jr. look good, doesn't it?) Assuming that the whole heaven/hell thing is accurate, children brought up in this culture would have no chance of a life in heaven after death. By taking them young, God brought them out of their corrupt environment, and at least some of them wouldn't have been sent to hell. He also probably caught the attention of the people of Egypt, as nothing else had worked so far.
According to Christians, (real ones, not Bush) God wants nothing more than for every human to repent of sin and take forgiveness and, by extension, life after death in heaven. What happens to you on earth is pretty much immaterial in the infinite scheme of things. Nowhere does God say that people in the bible are "exemplary for modern conduct", as that page says. They're human. They're supposed to be human. They're supposed to have all the same stupid problems we do, because we're supposed to learn how they overcame them, rather than striving to be like a perfect, unreachable ideal.
I won't claim to be an expert on the bible. I'm not. There are undoubtedly some references on that page that would stump me, had I looked at all of them, rather than just the few that I did.
That's why I work on computers for a living, rather than preach. I don't want to be an expert on the bible. (It does contain some very good lessons to all of us, though.)
But the fact that I (a non-biblical expert) could pick a few random links, and couterargue every single one of them, shows that maybe the page author doesn't completely know what they're talking about, and isn't taking a few things like cultural difference into account.
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......