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Court Battle Over Internet Calls
koweja writes "The federal appeals court has is hearing a petition to overturn an FCC rule that extends current wire-tapping laws to cover VoIP calls. The petition comes from various privacy advocacy groups, including the Center for Democracy and Technology. Aside from the obvious privacy issues, the rule requires that providers use equipment that allows wiretaps, which would require many companies to "upgrade" in order to comply."
With a system like Skype, which uses P2P for calls, how would this work?
I'm kind of ok with wiretapping, just as long as there ISN'T A BACKDOOR. I don't care what they say, a backdoor into anything is a bad idea.
After all, I could easily write an encrypted P2P voice chat program.
I'm sure they already exist...
The world is once again safe for democracy.
Cheers.
i'm thinking about the upgrades you would need to do to enable your VoIP phone to be wiretapped. wouldn't that require you to basically set up a wiretap yourself?
i'm glad that the appeal is being pushed through, because when new communications standards are made, new rules for them need to be made. you can't recycle postage rules for email, just like you can't recycle telephone rules for broadband phones. you have to make new ones. there shouldn't be a rule that governs a new standard until our politicians figure out what the standard actually does.
Don't laugh, it's a good question. If the wiretapping law is good it should apply to all. If it's bad, go lobby and vote to change it. Making exception for VOIP makes no sense.
route all data through skype servers
Not true. The secret services can already tap your internet packets. What they need is Skype providing the key to your P2P encryption.
Here's the major problem I see here. For the FBI to wiretap, they must have probable cause and a warrant. With such probable cause/warrant, they can do any number of things, from subpoenaing the suspect's ISP to placing surveillance devices right in the suspect's house. They've already got ways to eavesdrop if they follow the procedures they're required to follow.
Now, if the FBI had this wiretap authority, they could in effect tap any call, anytime. They would still in theory be required to get a warrant in order to use the stuff in court, but they'd have the switch to flip on. And there's been a push in recent years by you-know-who to allow secret evidence in court proceedings that the suspect gets no opportunity to even view, let alone challenge.
So, either law enforcement wants to be lazy, or they want an easier way to do an end-run around the rules. Neither way is a comforting thought to me.
To fight the war on terror, stop being afraid.
Justice Department spokesman Paul Bresson says court-authorized electronic surveillance is a critical law enforcement tool. "As communications technologies develop, we must ensure that such progress does not come at the expense of our nation's safety and security," he said.
You know, I hate to use such a corny mantra that if we allow this then the terrrorists have won. But really, this is exactly what's going on here. Look at the last words in the quote: safety and security
I can't help but think it's not really about that at all. The Feds, having been unable to connect the dots of 911 now want to make up for lost time with the ability to monitor every Internet conversation and what they don't realize is this will have no effect on organizations like al Qeada.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Ben Franklin... Oh, to be worthy of our forefathers.
Thinking about it, this may be a *good* thing. Soon, damn near everything will be encrypted traffic. No, I don't mean Skype and its proprietary stuff. I mean tunnel EVERYTHING thru TLS/SSL. Let 'em tap that and have a blast.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
VOIP can be tunnled to that it loooks like any other encrypted traffic. Are the feds going to start block :443 traffic because I may be tunneling my weekly call to my mom in the traffic?
And thats where traffic analysis comes in. Port 443 traffic usually consists of a lot of individual connections that remain open for a few seconds at most, with fairly significant breaks between page fetches. When your encypted VoIP session uses that port, its going to be either one continuous connection, or a lot of connections over a period of time with no break - traffic analysis would show that your connections dont match the usual makeup that 443 traffic generates.
Port 22 for SSH would be a better bet, but its not as widespread as 443 and the data rate is rather low on average, so again it would probably be fairly easy to discern when its being used for alternative reasons. I can already tell when something is transferred over scp or X11 forwarding over ssh, even if I cant tell what it is.
Im not saying that its easy or whatever, but dont kid yourself that you can just switch ports and hide amongst the traffic because you can tell a lot from the traffic itself. A HELL of a lot of information was descerned from Soviet radio broadcasts to spies in the western world between 1945 and 1970, even tho those broadcasts were encrypted - the traffic groups told MI5 exactly what type of spy the traffic was for (GRU, KGB, singleton etc) and how many other spies he was running. MI5 was able to estimate that tehre was 400 spies active in the UK during the 1950s that hadnt been discovered previously, and that figure was later confirmed by a defector.
If they are insisting the ISPs pay thir own money to upgrade to more-easily tappable equipment, then when everyone encrypts everything, they will make it illegal to use crypto in the US for which they don't have the s3cr37 b4ckd00r.
Failure to comply with that will be a crime since you'd be preventing them from easily listening in on you.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.