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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."
The feds created the internet, and now they have to deal with the implications. They aren't happy about it. Sure, they could use wiretapping on known VOIP services, but what's to stop someone from programming their own, using strong encryption. Sending sound packets over a network isn't that hard, encrypting them is also easy. Maybe you wouldn't have a super robust network, but so long as the person on the other end is getting the message, then that should be OK. Why aren't more criminals using PGP encrypted email? It seems like at this point it would be pretty obvious to them that they get caught when stuff isn't encrypted.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
What good does it really do? It's a moral standing, for one. Sort of like asking What Good the GPL does when things could be released under no license whatsoever, or... y'know, et cetera.
There may have been other ways to accomplish protection from VoIP wiretapping, but isn't it nice to not have to at all?
Im the senior architect for a major VoIP provider. Supporting Lawful intercept is just like e911, its trivial to do. Its how well you do it that makes it hard. Good networks (in terms of business logic, closely comparable with pstn networks etc) will accept calls at an edge device, and then proxy them through their network. This however has a cost as transporting sip+rtp == bandwidth. In this scenario, wiretapping is really really easy, but it has a cost associated with it. Skype on the other hand basically steals, by comparison, its bandwidth and does end-to-end connections. In essence its a fancy directory service with interconnects to the pstn. This has a lot of other implications from 911 to privacy. Some are good. Eg on skype no one working at skype can tap your calls (unless they include it in their soft client, and havnt done so yet to my knowledge). However, every isp inbetween can, with varying degrees of difficulty (encryption et all). The question comes down to, who do you trust to do fair and balanced intercept, because its going to happen somewhere. Is it your isp under supeona, or is it the voip carrier who does it all day long. /. 'rs often complain about cease and decist letters, next thing it'll be wiretap letters and they'll comply just as fast. So be careful what you wish for. This society will not give up the ability to combat crime through selective, targeted, electronic monitoring. In fact in the last few years with commander kuku bananas in charge theyve made it even more prevailent. The fact of the matter is skype got kicked outta china, because their tech doesnt support lawful intercept, while others are getting licensed. Something for nothing just isnt gonna happen for the masses in telecom, theres too many special interest groups. You'll see gun control first; mark my words. If the VoIP community fights lawful intercept, E-911, privacy laws et all, and the internet community supports them. The special interests will do in the us as they have done in china, and just firewall the whole freakin country. Dont think it can't/wont happen here.
IIRC, the wiretap provisions only apply to VoIP POTS interconnects. Straight VoIP VoIP isn't covered by this, only where they interact with the regular phone system. Thus Skype Skype isn't covered, but SkypeOut *IS*.
None-the-less, odd are the courts will rule the FCC doesn't have the authority to enforce this. Even the FCC members who voted for this stated that it was on some convoluted, shakey logic.
-Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68306, 00.html
;)
wired has a good article on an open source project for an encrypted voip application.
let's see them wiretap that
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
Considering the amount of overhead that would be required to encrypt and decrypt a constant data stream such as VoIP, it seems to me that you'd have pretty bad performance problems.
The federal government has always failed to prevent things like this for two reasons: bureaucratic bullshit like fiefdoms in the middle of the CIA and FBI that don't like each other and petty politics. For the last 15 years the CIA lost most of its overseas operational assets, especially in its special operations commando units. These were the people who quietly "got the job done" behind a building with a silencer-equipped pistol or high-powered rifle. You never heard of it happening, except when it was abused like in Latin America.
Here's a dirty little fact for the neoconservatives and the Bushitler wants to annihilate all non-born again Christians lunies. You cannot combine anti-terrorism units with law enforcement and you cannot expect things to be clean regardless of the solution. Yes, if we let the CIA quietly murder these terrorists without judicial oversight it could be abused. But it's a lesser evil than relying on the bumbling law enforcement apparatus in this country to do its job. The FBI spends as much time doing PR and lobbying as it does on enforcing the law; we really need to get a high barrier between a group like the CIA and everybody else and let that agency do its job in secrecy.
Yes, let people outside the chain of command know what is happening, but don't let the spooks work with law enforcement unless the police are operating in a purely, unequivocably subordinate position so that they cannot lean on the spooks for more power and resources. What concerns me is precisely this beefing up of John Q. Cop's police powers, not the CIA and others being able to discretely beat up and kill people who want to rape, pillage and murder civilians of ANY nationality. I'd have no problem with the CIA torturing the hell out of, then executing some scumbag terrorist in Afghanistan or Iraq like Zarqawi who vascillates between blowing up our soldiers and innocent women and children.
This stuff isn't going to get the job done, unless the job is to create a more effective police state. The real section to fear isn't a strong intelligence apparatus, but a law enforcement one whose resources and powers are almost instinguishable from the spooks. The spooks have, when allowed to do their job, much more to worry about than domestic issues. Be very afraid of this and increased efforts to force them to work together, especially when the FBI are jockying for the CIA's foreign intelligence role and the CIA wants to keep its turf. Nothing good can come out of it, and the most probable motive for making the police so powerful is precisely to squash domestic trouble and not of the terrorist variety.
Think RICO and Operation Rescue if you need a starting point on how these special police powers tend to show their true, ugly purpose once they're firmly established in the law so that no lawyer can imagine living without them to "protect us."
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Here's the major problem I see here. For the FBI to wiretap, they must have probable cause and a warrant.
Uh, remember the (so-called) PATRIOT act? All that law enforcement needs to do is claim that you might be a terrorist and wiretap laws go out the window. Along with them, your privacy. They don't need to substantiate their "might be a terrorist" in any way, nor do they have to make that claim before doing the wiretap.
It's just fucking hideous. Terrorists attack, and the US Govt immediately turns around and hands our defeat to the terrorists. If the terrorists want to attack our freedoms, then they have already had some pretty major successes!
(and this is one of those few times where a little swearing is very appropriate)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Correct. The ruling also covers any broadband over 200Kbps separately - i.e. they can force your ISP to tap your connection. The act really is about forcing the ISPs to install equipment to make it EASY to tap by flipping a switch electronically - they already had the power to order a tap; it's just that it might be hard/slow/impossible for the ISP to comply. And yes, this means there's a HUGE gaping hole waiting for someone to exploit. Knowing the capability is there is 1/2 the battle of accessing it, and CALEA spells out a lot of specifics about the interface.
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This lawsuit is about the part of the ruling that states that in addition to the ISP, any VoIP supplier who has any connection (even through a 3rd party!) to a PSTN gateway must provide the same ease-of-tapping under CALEA for ALL calls. Not just calls going to/from the PSTN, ALL calls.
Colleges are suing as well (separately), over the up to 7 or more BILLION dollars to re-architect and rebuild their campus networks to support this. The original CALEA was aimed at telephone companies; gave them years to comply; and reimbursed them for their expenses. None of that here.
This means Skype (unless they drop SkypeOut/SkypeIn). Ditto Vonage, sipphone, etc. I think FWD might be ok since it's IP-2-IP only.
Check out http://pulver.com/ and Pulver's blog on this http://pulverblog.pulver.com/archives/003241.html
Should an individual have the legal right to secretly break into another individual's computer or phone network and conduct a search or seizure of data? Does an individual have a moral right to do such a thing?
If not, then exactly what moral justification does an individual use to delegate that "right" to government? Does the process of democracy legitimize that "right"?
Should government be allowed to enter and search your home without your permission, and without your knowledge? Without a court order? Why or why not? (If anyone wasn't aware, the "patriot act" provides government with exactly that power.)
What is more important to "society", criminal justice, or human rights? What is more important to each individual? What exactly is society?
As a wedge: to break and finally remove the existing wiretapping laws. They should not exist, but voting is FAR too blunt an instrument to remove them. The best way to make a bad law go away is to break it.
As an example, VOIP is a pointer to a wider fact: communication is fungible, because bits are fungible. The only way to wiretap every conversation, is to wiretap every packet and datum on the inernet. Further, there are no longer any "marginal" loopholes. A loophole which can be automated, can be adopted wholesale and worldwide. Therefore, it becomes a binary choice: total Big Brother, or no Big Brother. Wiretapping was always a trade-off, and I would argue that technical progress has made it unacceptable.