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Newsbrief:
Feds
Want
Ability
to
Wiretap
VoIP
--
DEA
Included,
Naturally
1/16/04
The Justice Department, the
FBI, and the DEA have all signed a letter to the Federal Communications
Commission asking it to order companies that offer Voice over Internet
Protocol (VoIP) telephone services to reengineer their networks so law
enforcement has the ability to overhear subscribers' conversations.
Without those rules, the agencies warned in the letter delivered to the
FCC in December, "criminals, terrorists, and spies (could) use VoIP services
to avoid lawfully authorized surveillance."
VoIP offers telephone service
through the Internet and bypasses regular phone company networks.
Companies such as Vonage and Skype have stirred the telephony world by
offering low, set-price long distance service, and the big telephone companies
are now beginning to enter the competition. But the more consumers
turn to VoIP, the more telephone conversations slip out of the grasp of
would-be government wiretappers.
While the Justice Department
prefers for political reasons to paint the request -- and legions of other
post-911 encroachments on privacy -- as part of the war on terrorism, if
VoIP wiretaps run in similar patterns to regular wiretaps, then the main
target is not terrorists but drug scofflaws. In 2002, the last year
for which information is available, law enforcement listened to nearly
2.2 million phone conversations under court-approved wiretaps. More
than 80% of them were related to drug investigations, according to the
Administrative Office of the US Courts.
The question the FCC must
ponder is whether VoIP falls within the mandate of the 1994 Communications
Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA). That law, a legacy of
the Clinton administration -- the imperatives of the security state being
a bipartisan endeavor -- requires "telecommunications carriers" but not
"information services" to provide ready wiretapping access. If the
FCC rules against the feds, they could then appeal to Congress to rewrite
the law.
But it's probably all for
naught, anyway, said Jim Harper of the privacy advocacy web site Privacilla.org.
"The FCC should ignore pleas about national security and sophisticated
criminals because sophisticated parties will use noncompliant VoIP, available
open source and offshore," he told CNet News. "CALEA for VoIP will
only be good for busting small-time bookies, small-time potheads and other
nincompoops."
-- END --
|
Issue #320, 1/16/04
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