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

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

[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

[TheLetterPsy]

It's doubly bad

You misspelled doubleplusungood.

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

[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?

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

[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.

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.