FCC Affirms VoIP Must Allow Snooping

MarsGov writes "The FCC released an order yesterday that requires all broadband providers and all "interconnected" VoIP providers to implement CALEA — in other words, law enforcement can snoop on your online conversations, both voice and text. While this is no surprise, it makes encryption for VoIP even more urgent."

Comments

VOIP

[rodgster]

Oh come on. Like most of it isn't wide open to begin with (Vonage) or run by known lapdogs to the Govmint (Skype). The only way it could be more readily (and easily) monitored (and data mined) would be if it was run by the NSA's favorite lapdog ..... drum roll please ...... AT&T.

No surprise at all

[slusich]

No surprise here at all.
The goverment isn't even willing to get proper warrants to tap regular phone and internet service. VOIP won't be any different.
Look for encryption to be made illeagal for all phone and IP services in the very near future.
This is just another step in the war on the constitution.

Re:No surprise at all

[ZSpade]

Yet they've been doing this for years. Nothing has really changed. Could you encrypt your old land line telephone? Can you encrypt your cellphone calls? For the most part no. The government has been doing this for years, why should things change now.

Just don't say they're getting worse without really looking at our past. Nothing has gotten worse, only the means to which our "rights" are negated as changed.

Re:No surprise at all

[CastrTroy]

Meanwhile, all the criminals who really know what they're doing will send messages PGP encrypted, or use even more sophisticated methods of encrypting their files, and hiding who the messages are travelling between. Wow, so they can tap Joe sixpack's phone. It's bad that they are mandating this. It's doubly bad that it won't stop any really dangerous criminals.

Re:No surprise at all

[Anonymous Coward]

"Meanwhile, all the criminals who really know what they're doing..."

[emphasis mine]

Strange how often this phrase comes up. I realize the poster did not mean it this way, but this is exactly what the government wants people to think and will most likely be the next stage of attack. Criminals use crypto, and all do.

"...will send messages PGP encrypted, or use even more sophisticated methods of encrypting their files, and hiding who the messages are travelling between."

Strangely, PGP is really simply good for convenience and simplicity (one passphrase), remote communication where you've never met the person (nothing person to person in meatspace) such that only a non-secure communication channel (verify the person, make sure hash agrees--hell, probably easier to plan a man in a middle attack here soon given real-time communication processing and human voice prompting advances) or a trusted other person (key sign off) enables the crypto.

iow, frankly, if you want security, you'd be using totally unbreakable one-time pads and securing the pad with some decent standard password crypto (DES3 at minimum). Any business or friend communication that I want secure, I've actually met the person at least once. With DVDs, the next gen recordable DVD, LTO2 or LTO3 drives, and the like, even a large hard drive, that's a hell of a lot of data before you need to generate a new pad.

Re:No surprise at all

[moogle001]

Do you really believe the government doesn't have ways of cracking common encryption techniques if it wants to? Regardless, as has already been pointed out, this is nothing different than regular phones being tapped. If you want to moan about attacks on the constitution, point your fingers at Bush's *illegal* wiretapping and not the FCC.

Re:No surprise at all

[dodobh]

Meanwhile, all the criminals who really know what they're doing will send messages PGP encrypted, or use even more sophisticated methods of encrypting their files, and hiding who the messages are travelling between.

Actually, they will just lobby for their crime to become legalised. Witness Haliburton, RIAA, MPAA, Bush...

Crime is now legal. As long as you can pay off the crooks in power.

Re:No surprise at all

[noidentity]

Once privacy is outlawed, only criminals will have any.

Re:No surprise at all

[solus1232]

I think you are giving criminals too much credit.

Joe sixpack might not be smart enough to commnicate over a secure channel, or simply not communicate over a possibly compromised channel at all (prepaid cell phones anyone?), but why do you think the average criminal would be?

You make it sound like a disproportionate number of law abiding citizens will be affected by this order because real criminals will be smart enough to use encryption. The majority of criminal actions are motivated by a combination of desperation and lack of common sense and thus the average criminal will be less likely to use an anonymous form of communication than the average citizen.

Re:No surprise at all

[Anonymous Coward]

The amount of power held by the US government today (especially the federal government) absolutely dwarfs the amount of power US citizens were subject to only 100 years ago. Every year there are thousands more laws on the books than the year before, and every year government secures more power and revenue than the year before. Government power has been expanding at light speed more or less since Lincoln was president, some would say even before that.

I'd say absolutely, things are unquestionably worse today. And undoubtedly, the level of oppression will be higher 20 years from today, and higher yet in 40 years. Look at the big picture, not the details -- the level of oppression is increasing, not holding steady (and definitely not receding).

If you really want to make it simple, look at the history of government spending. The more government spends, the more powerful its special "right" to employ coercion must be, and therefore, the higher the level of oppression. It's not rocket science, it's common sense.

Re:No surprise at all

[TheLetterPsy]

It's doubly bad

You misspelled doubleplusungood.

Re:No surprise at all

[mrogers]

Do you really believe the government doesn't have ways of cracking common encryption techniques if it wants to?

Yes, I believe that. Cryptanalysis is an international science - take the recent SHA-1 collision attack, for example. I'm sure the NSA would love a backdoor into the world's encryption systems, but luckily the NSA realises that there are plenty of talented cryptographers in other countries who would be able to find and exploit any such backdoor, damaging the business and military interests of America and its allies.

As long as a significant fraction of the world's cryptanalysts are located outside of Fort Meade, the NSA's best bet is to recommend the strongest cryptosystems it knows about.

Re:No surprise at all

[BandwidthHog]

But I thought the justification for all this was to catch terrorists? They are generally considered to be thorough and crafty enough to take these sorts of precautions. The typical late night mugging doesn’t involve groups of conspirators hatching their plot from remote locations.

And your assertion that the average law-abiding citizen will be unaffected by this depends on how you define ‘affected.’ If I mount a video camera in your bathroom but never act (that you know of) on the footage I receive, have you been affected?

Skype

[CliffSpradlin]

And of COURSE Skype had to be bought out just months ago by an American company (eBay).

It doesn't matter for many VOIP calls

[petard]

Encryption for VOIP won't help in many scenarios that LEAs are interested in. If you're calling a land line from your VOIP connection, the end point on the land line won't be able to decrypt the conversation, so even if all of the VOIP traffic is encrypted you'll have to go to the PSTN in the clear. AIUI, that's what they mean by "interconnected".

Re:It doesn't matter for many VOIP calls

[l2718]

Note that even if they wanted to, LEA don't have the computing power available to monitor every call. On the other hand, analysing the call graph is quite tractable and completely orthogonal to the content. Enryption won't protect you from the government knowing who you're taking to!

Re:It doesn't matter for many VOIP calls

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

even if they wanted to, LEA don't have the computing power available to monitor every call.

I'm too lazy to dig up the links, so go ahead and mod me for missing my tin-foil-hat...

With all the talk of Bush authorizing international wire-taps on US-to-non-US citizens, it came up that the most probably reason the NSA is involved (see the current case EFF vs ATT) is that the NSA's Echelon system does have the throughput to handle that kind of workload. That Echelon was initially designed to snoop on purely international traffic, but it is just as easily turned on US citizens if the right (or wrong) person wants it to be so.

Just from an algorithmic viewpoint - that kind of workload is going to fall in the "embarrasingly parallel" group which means you can just keep adding PCs to scale-up to a volume of phone calls that is limited only by floorspace and electricity.

traffic analysis

[r00t]

One can learn a lot by knowing:

a. who you call, when you call them, and for how long
b. who calls you, when they call you, and for how long
c. who these other people communicate with
d. what all these phone numbers are associated with (bank accounts, etc.)

why is this a big deal?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are slashdot readers all using encryption on their existing telephone lines? If not, why does it matter now that it's VOIP?

Re:Encrypting is a bad otpoins

[Travelsonic]

While I undersnad that you may have concerns about your privacy, you do not need to worry because you are not doing anything that the FBI will be intersted in.

Sorry, sugar coat it all you want, but that is jsut another variant of the fallacy that "If You're Doing Nothing Wrong There's No Need to Worry". For one you as the average citizen have no idea what kidns of clasified things the FBI does behind your back, or for that matter how that would work in with this issue, two even if there are promises from govt. officials about keeping provacy secure, histroy will tell you that this will either isn't true at all, will not be true for long, or is an honest ida gon awry.

If you aarre, than the system is working and you have no right to complain anywy.

What if you are doing what is "not wrong" tpo the average person and law abiding citizen then? Didn't think of that huh? Look back in history: Sacco and Vanzetti, the Red Scare, people of Japanese DECENT for christ's sake being sent to camps - even internationally things like the Jewish concentration camps in Germany tell you that this is not true all the time, and can not be treated that way safely.

Re:The key word...

[chill]

Thank you (again), Phil.

Well, I just read the EULA and I want to retract that statement. Thanks for nothing, Phil. Nothing like selling out, is there? Ka-ching!

  -Charles

Choose a VOIP provider outside the US

[pilotcam]

I live in the US, but my VoIP provider is based in Canada. (So is the phone number.) Silly... no matter what, there's always a way around this for anyone that's the least bit determined.

Re:AHA!

[Dance_Dance_Karnov]

use prepaid cell phones (wth cash of course, and only use them once and then throw it down a sewer drain) and talk ambigiously.

Again....

[Doytch]

What makes the FCC think that they can make laws about programs that exist OUTSIDE of the US? Why should my VOIP program have security holes because of the big bad terrorists terrorizing the US?

Re:Encrypting is a bad otpoins

[NoseSocks]

To expand on this point:
What most people don't seem to grasp is the quality of the average government worker. They are human. They will make typos, they will misunderstand things, they will be lazy, etc. There will be instances of "Buttle vs. Tuttle", in which case the innocent will be accidentally treated like the guilty.
This should be our biggest fear when faced with the erosion of our rights and more intrusive actions by the government. You could have done nothing wrong, but still have something to worry about. Now they have more avenues of data....to make more mistakes on.

I'll bite troll this is why govt spying is bad

[mrraven]

This no doubt a troll but I'll bite for all the confused kiddies out there who might take this argument seriously. If you lived in the Soviet Union the spies were OK right because if you weren't doing anything illegal you had nothing to hide right? Same for Nazi Germany, and the "legitimate" government of Britain in the American colonies in 1775.

But it's different now you'll protest those were tyrannies and we are in a democracy. Well listen up my friend it's ISN'T that different, the president is in DIRECT violation of the constitution by declaring war on his own whim only Congress can declare war according to the constitution (and no Congresses rubber stamp allowing the president to declare war was not legit), further that war was declared by the president based on lies (see the Downing Street memos), further we are torturing people, and used Napalm or a Napalm like substance on civilians in Fallujah which is war crime, further NSA wiretaps without a court order are a violation of the bill of rights, further we have by FAR the largest prison population in the industrialized world at over 2 million, 100,000s of which are in there for victimless drug crimes, or pissing off their neighbor and being turned in for "sex crimes." Do you start to see why some of us want to be able to communicate without the government butting into our damn business?

Re:I'll bite troll this is why govt spying is bad

[BalanceOfJudgement]

"No government is worth killing or dying for."

Unless you're dying to destroy that government, if it has violated the social contract that allows it to operate.

This government, has. This government, and almost every Western government in the world, is guilty of high treason against its own people.

There will come a day when they pay the price for treason.. and there is only one price for treason.

I can't wait for that day.

Re:I'll bite troll this is why govt spying is bad

[TubeSteak]

Many people seem confused about the status of Iraq.
Iraq is a conflict, the result of an "authorization to use force".

Nobody declared war.

Not the President, not Congress.

Iraq, like Vietnam, is not a Capital "W" War.

They talk about "war" in the media, but it isn't a War.

The only "War Powers" the President has is the power (more like a requirement) to report to Congress on the progress of the situation/troops in Iraq.

The Global War On Terror != Iraq
GWOT is like the War On Drugs, or the War on Poverty.

Re:I'll bite troll this is why govt spying is bad

[greenrom]

Perhaps today would be a good day for a brief civics lesson. Here is the text of the fourth amendement.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

There is no absolute protection of privacy granted in that amendment. In fact, it wasn't until 1967 in Katz vs. United States when the Supreme Court ruled that the fourth amendment could offer protection against wiretaps, reversing previous rulings that said the opposite. In the Katz ruling, the court extended the definition of "search" to include government intrusion into something in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy. Even after the Katz ruling, the fourth amendment only offers protection against unresonable searches. There are still a lot of cases when the government can conduct a search and violate your privacy. One obvious time is when a warrant is obtained for the search after probable cause of a crime is presented to a judge. However, there are other cases where searches are not deemed unreasonable. If a police officer is walking by your house and hears screaming and believes someone is in danger, he can forcefully enter your house without a warrant. There's no violation of the fourth amendment because under the circumstances, entering the house to ensure the saftey of another person is not considdered an "unreasonable" search. If you are stopped for a traffic violation, the police officer is free to shine his flashlight in your window and look around the passenger area. That's because the courts have ruled that if items are within view, there is no expectation of privacy. As for the NSA's warrantless wiretaps, those are certainly in the gray area. The president argues that warrantless wiretaps of international calls are permitted under Article II as part of the military authority granted to the executive branch so long as the wiretaps are used for intellegence gathering related to national security, not criminal investigations. Others argue that the wiretaps are an unreasonable government intrusion when there is an expectation of privacy. Both arguments have merit, and reasonable people can have different opinions on the legality of these wiretaps. This is really an issue that needs to be resolved by the courts.

You seem to have many complaints with the United States government. I doubt there was ever a time in the history of the United States when you would have been happy with this country's laws or actions. In fact, I doubt there was ever a country in the history of the world in which you would be content. However, I hope I'm wrong, and I hope you find a place to live where you will be happy. If you do, I hope your utopia is as perfect as you envision.

Re:I'll bite troll this is why govt spying is bad

[mrraven]

Or you could just walk away from it and let it collapse of it's own weight. Or to put it in slashdot speak some of us interpret governments as blockages and route around them.

Akido works too you know, sometimes meeting stupid force with more stupid force only leaves two pointlessly bruised and injured people. If you want to pirate music, or do drugs, or encrypt, or look at porn just do it already, they just don't have that many cops, really our own "internal cops" as William Burroughs put it is a bigger block than the thinly spread actual cops.

I've been to a lot of protests in my day yet recently I'm coming to the conclusion that the best revenge is not to fight the assholes but just live the way you want to live and ignore the assholes. See also the temporary autonomous zone:

http://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html

See also the postcarbon institute which is people putting in gardens working on solar power and figuring other ways to "re-localize" and live outside leviathan/empire/molach.

http://www.postcarbon.org/

Really our effort is better put into figuring out how to practically live in a sustainable, peaceful way,that preserves knowledge and global culture in the 21st century, rather than to fight the dying dinosaur governments.

The FCC exceeds its boundaries regularly

[E-Sabbath]

Do they even have jurisdiction over this matter? I recall their order implementing a broadcast flag, when they had no ability to do so.

What mandate have they to control the Internet? Their jurisdiction is for the broadcast spectrum.

Re:The FCC exceeds its boundaries regularly

[Anonymous Coward]

1. They are not attempting to control the Internet. This is merely one use of the Internet.

2. The CALEA law gives the FCC the authority to make these rules. From the document:

"A telecommunications carrier shall ensure that any interception of communications or access to call-identifying information effected within its switching premises can be activated only in accordance with a court order or other lawful authorization and with the affirmative intervention of an individual officer or employee of the carrier acting in accordance with regulations prescribed by the Commission."

The Commission that is being referred to is the FCC, as defined near the beginning of the document.

I know it has been said plenty of times before, but try reading TFA sometime. It took me less than a minute to follow the link to Wikipedia for the summary of CALEA, which contained another link to the actual text of the law where I found the answer to your question. Stop expecting other people to track down information that you can find for yourself with a little effort.

Every back door can be abused

[cpu_fusion]

As the convenience for the government to wiretap increases, the ease for a third party (inside or outside the government) to abuse such a mechanism also increases.

There was a debate back in the Clinton era as to whether or not encryption on the Internet needed a "back door" for the FBI. I had thought that the argument regarding the potential problems safeguarding these "master keys" had won out. Having the FBI spying on you with a warrant is one thing, but having organized crime, a private investigator, or some rogue arm of government (quite a few of those these days it seems), ... that's another thing entirely.

If you trust the government not to abuse this, then consider whether you trust the government to be able to effectively safeguard access to this. Ignoring social engineering (e.g. $), how likely is the government to have every bit of this infrastructure protected against stealthful 3rd party break-ins?

Suddenly blackmail is going to get a lot easier.

It took many decades for the Internet to flower and change the world with its freedoms. It is taking far less for the governments of the world to deflower the Internet and sow the seeds of thought control.

Re:Action Time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Get that shit posted on the front page, dude.

Re:Encrypting is a bad otpoins

[BalanceOfJudgement]

And to expand on THAT idea a little...

Two weeks ago, no less than THREE government agencies were given FAILING GRADES FOR PROPERLY SECURING THEIR DATA. THREE. The FBI, The Department of Homeland Security, and one other I forget at the moment.

THREE. And these were just the ones investigated.

Two days ago, the IRS was given a "barely passing" grade when it was discovered that their employees STILL answer over 60% of tax filing questions WRONG.

And THESE are the people we want to entrust our most secret daily lives and data to?

Yeah right. I'll take a stereo broadcasting my credit card number into a stadium before I would ever trust the government with one iota of important information..

Particularly given that I am a government contractor and EVERY DAY get to see how incompetent these people really are.

Terrorist attacks

[Anonymous Coward]

That's okay. Usually when I plan my terrorist attacks, I don't use VoIP. It pays to just have a spoke wheel conspiracy like we used for the September 11th attacks. That way all communication is done through personal meetings and few people know enough of the plan for it to get leaked even if one of our members is busted.

In fact I am quite happy to see this new FCC order. Don't forget our goals with September 11th was to break America down and give politicians reasons to take the freedoms away from the public. We know that this will destroy the free spirit upon which their economy is built and allow our radical message to flourish.

Long live the FCC!

-Osama

Here We go Again

[cyberscan]

Better yet, it is time to either join, form, or support independent political parties. Face the facts, the Democratic - Republican party is funded and controlled by special interests. Special interests make political campaign contributions and pay for advertising. Voters do not. Things will change ONLY when people decide to smarten up and quit being manipulated by the special interest financed advertisements (and that includes internet advertising such as blogs like this one).

'We the People' have seen what decades of power shifting between Democrats and Republicans has accomplished - more government, higher taxes, and less freedom. Out of the entire Congress, there may be one (Ron Paul) or two members that even care about such a thing as the Constitution. Just about all of Congress is made up of Republicans or Democrats. Each party accomplishes the same thing by eroding different freedoms.

Republicans may not be as hard on gun ownership as Democrats, but they are sure hard on the fourth amendment of the Constitution. Both parties support the flooding of our nation with cheap, slave-made goods. Both apparantly have a disregard for human rights. I know that I for one am tired of the years and years of broken promises and false hope that is preached by these two parties. Both of these parties have shown us what they can do for (to) us. We have seen their work. Now, let's try something else.

This election season as well as 2008, it is high time that we as a people support alternative parties such as the Libertarian Party ( http://www.lp.org/ ), Constitution Party( http://www.constitutionparty.org/ ), Green Party ( http://www.gp.org/ ), Veteran's Party, Socialist Party, and any other political party other than the two corrupt lamescream parties that have been duping the people for decades.

I for one support the Constitution Party, Libertarian Party, and Veteran's party (in that order). I will only vote for a "Republicrat" or "Demican" only if there is nobody else on the ballot and there is no write in blank. Even then, I have sometimes abstained from marking a choice. But of course, we will always have some people who insist on voting the "Lessor of Two Evils" because they believe that candidates of other political parties "don't stand a chance of winning."

Tell that to Jim Gilchrist (Founder of Minuteman Project) who ran for Congress under the American Independent Party. He won the most votes on election day and was only done in by absentee ballots (apparantly, the absentee voters never got a chance to hear his message or the election was rigged). Aagree with him or not, he showed that a candidate from an alternative party actually had a good chance of winning. Apparently, the people in that distric in California are sick and tired of the bullsh1t that spew from the Republican/Democratic Party.

I hope that people this election are not so stupid as to give up their freedoms to the sellout lamescream political party that has manipulated them for years. Each time I hear people bitch and moan that Gore should have won the election or that "Democrats" tried to appeal and recount their way to victory, I want to puke. IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE which one should have, could have or had won, the results are the same. More government, higher taxes, more rules and fewer freedoms for the people. I want limited government, so that is why I vote for candidates of the Constituion and Libertarian parties. I hope people who read this are not stupid enough to throw their vote away on a Republicrat

Re:Here We go Again

[celotil]

I hope that people this election are not so stupid as to give up their freedoms to the sellout lamescream political party that has manipulated them for years. Each time I hear people bitch and moan that Gore should have won the election or that "Democrats" tried to appeal and recount their way to victory, I want to puke. IT MAKES NO DIFFERENCE which one should have, could have or had won, the results are the same. More government, higher taxes, more rules and fewer freedoms for the people. I want limited government, so that is why I vote for candidates of the Constituion and Libertarian parties. I hope people who read this are not stupid enough to throw their vote away on a Republicrat

You, the true patriots of America, the people who will stand and fight their own government to save the freedoms they have now and liberate the freedoms you had before PATRIOT, have until sometime between the start of July and the end of September 2008.

I predict, as I'm sure a few other people have done, that sometime between those dates, there will be another "terrorist attack" on United States soil.

I don't want this to happen, and I already weep for the people who will die in this event, but I believe that your government will, if not directly take part, at least allow this to happen.

Why?

Take a good long look at September 11, 2001. Take another good long look at the bombings in London on July 7, 2005.

I repeat, I don't want this to happen. I am filled with rage and sorrow right now at the people who presented the official reports on 9/11 and 7/7, and the people who used these and earlier governmental and departmental reports to justify such things as the PATRIOT act, extensive wire-tapping without judicial process, and the mistreatment of anyone deemed to be an "enemy combatant".

The thought even occurs to me that this next attack might happen in a "token" ally country, like Canada, or my home, Australia, set up to look like a Muslim or other religion-based attack from the "axis of evil".

Second prediction - Within hours of the attack, the FBI or Department of Homeland Security will have a prepared statement that says they know who performed the attacks and how. Within 48 hours, probably less, they will state that they have conclusive evidence to prove their earlier statement.

There will be no oversight on this evidence from a third, impartial party to verify and confirm the previous statements. Any actual evidence of the attacks will be removed as quickly as possible from the public eye "in the interests of preventing further panic and allowing the people to recover quickly and get on with their lives".

This clean up will remove the real evidence of what happened, just like what happened after September 11, and I presume happened very shortly after July 7. Two to three years later there will be a government sponsored report on what happened, and it will be as full of holes and ommissions as the official report on September 11 is.

More freedoms will be lost. In all likelyhood most of the changes will happen behind the scenes, nibbling away at what freedoms US citizens have now. There will be no grand gesture on the part of the government to look after and protect its people by removing mass amounts of rights and privileges. The grand gesture was the "terrorist attack", orchestrated by those capable of doing so in order to shake up and ready the people's minds to a gentle lessening of freedoms.

People in westernised countries are being terrorised every day, but it's not by foreigners. The terror is coming from inside their own heads, their imaginations, and the people putting the imagery in

Re: Cause of terrorism

[rodgster]

The cause of terrorism is religious zealots. They're all the same.

That goes for whatever side of the coin you happen to be viewing. All are a bunch of total fools if you ask me.

From some a@@Hole who promises you 17 or WTF ever virgins if you complete some stupid suicide mission.

to

Some Frat Boy who burned his brains out on bourbon & coke and says that he's doing God's will (most people who think they talk to God are viewed to be either insane or a pope).

I got Karma to burn so I'm free to say (to the off topic a@@holes who don't like my sig) that your fascist (jack booted) leader has been responsible for the deaths of more Iraqis than Sadam (Insane) who is currently on trial for such.

Tell me oh fascist dipsticks why we shouldn't send Arbusto to the Hague for trial?

Or we just impeach him then throw him and his crew in jail for perjury (I believe that today that fact is so well established that even you fool ditto heads cannot ignore it) here in the good ol' US of A?

IMHO our founding fathers would tar, feather & ride this asshat and his crew out on a rail if they were around today.

Re:Thomas Jefferson with a cell phone would have d

[mrraven]

The "terrorists" scare me FAR less than people like you. Stay the fuck out of MY phone calls, and electronic files.

SIP Protocols and Encryption and 3-Way calls

[billstewart]

First of all, you don't want to attack the strong links when there are weak links that'll get what you need. A Wiretap is a 3-Way-Call with the Univited Party on Mute. So you don't try to break the cryto, you try to make sure you're on the call.

SIP Control Support for Encryption is Limited. There are two main kinds of encryption used in SIP - call setup messages, which can be implemented using TLS (SSL's successor) or left unencrypted, and media channel encryption, which is done end-to-end by the caller and callee, but still gets set up through the SIP controller. Unfortunately, too many of the SIP Session Border Controllers and other packet-handling equipment don't have the horsepower to set up the media-channel crypto. It's especially true for equipment that's scalable renough to handle a whole phone company, as opposed to equipment that's designed to run as a PBX or SOHO VOIP system, so even if your phone can do it, the controller might not ask, (Phil Zimmermann's latest work tries to fix this.)

The really really cool thing about SIP is that you can chain multiple proxy servers together to build things, resolve issues about control, and isolate problems and information domains. It's also good that the handshaking is much simpler and more SMTP-like, as opposed to the evil complexities of leftover ISDN protocols data formats and interactions, and there are a couple of other useful capabiliies, but the basic big win is that you can chain the SIP servers together.

Can someone show me...

[thebdj]

where this is any different then the cops being allowed to tap regular telephones? Seriously, have they once said that the cops will have unfettered access to this information without a warrant? If not, then I do not see why there is this urgent need for encryption on VoIP. I mean we are talking about the police agencies being able to have the same access to listen to VoIP conversations that they already have to tap every other phone line in America.

Now, I am sure you are all wearing your tin foil caps, but really this is not about some great big brother monitoring scheme. If you are so scared about people listening to your calls, you do not need encryption. Just start talking in code. Afterall, mobsters and just about anyone else committing illegal activity have been doing it for years to avoid being overheard.

I just am afraid I do not see everyone elses great concern in this matter. Of course, my lack of VoIP means that monitoring my calls is already quiet within the realm of possibility. As for the text conversation part, if I were truly concerned about stuff I was saying the last way I would transmit it would be over IM or through e-mail.

Funny, underrated, impressive

[marcus]

Wow! A multi-level contextually appropriate literary reference on /.!

I don't have any mod points today.