Can They Hear You Now? How the FBI eavesdrops on Internet phone calls (and why it sometimes can't).

MSN ^ | Thursday, Feb. 19, 2004, at 2:49 PM PT | By David S. Bennahum

[BeerSwillr]

The Federal Communications Committee and the Justice Department are at loggerheads over a new problem in the war on terror: how to listen in on Internet phone calls. Thanks to the blistering growth of VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol services, which have been adopted by approximately 10 million people worldwide so far, law enforcement officials now worry that wiretapping may one day become technically obsolete. If traditional phone lines go the way of the horse and carriage, will the FBI still be able to listen in on Internet phone calls? How would it go about tapping one? Is it even possible?

[BeerSwillr]

Interesting stuff this voice over IP

[StatesEnemy]

You are now in the 'State of Avaya'

[zeugma]

Excellent. What I say on the telephone is not FedGov's business.

One of the companies mentioned, skype provides end to end encryption services. If the crypto is set up in a logical manner, even skype wouldn't be able to decrypt the call. This is excellent stuff. I can't wait until this tech is more common.

[dd5339]

Skype ping!

Semper Fi

[BeerSwillr]

You're absolutely right.

And it's not only Skype. They happened to be mentioned in the article. Many telecom manufacturers now offer AES for encrypting VOIP.

The great thing about it is each endpoint in a call will negotiate the private key and once complete there is currently no way to decrypt the call.

[Dead Corpse]

What I say on the telephone is not FedGov's business.

(sarcasm)Sure it is. You might be a terrorist, or doing phone adverts prior to an election, or maybe you are doing someting really evil like being a Constitutional supporter domestic terrorist.(/sarcasm)

Kinda depends on which party holds the reigns of power. Just remember who it was that didn't approve of the expanded Federal wire-tap provisions in the PATRIOT Act. Civil libertarians and us nutcase "Constamatooshunalists" have been warning about expanded federal powers like this since Clinton was still in office and Project Meggido was tagging all of our IP addys.

Just because Bush & Co. may not misuse these powers, bet your bottom dollar that President Hillary WOULD abuse them.

Remember the old maxim, "Never give your government more power over you than you would your worst enemy."

[Dead Corpse]

They also said RC5 Bovine could not be broken. The distributed processing community proved that one false.

With enough time, or computing power, ANY encryption can be broken.

[BeerSwillr]

You'll get no argument from me about that ...there is currently no way to decrypt the call.

[Dead Corpse]

At one point in time, we also thought that there was no way the government could monitor millions of communications channels simultaneously searching for keywords. Then the NSA came clean on Eschelon.

Even private keys are not foolproof.

[Vic3O3]

It's not that the call or the email cannot be decrypted, EVENTUALLY, the thing is it will take them too long to do it so any info contained within is pretty much useless for realtime prevention.