[IP] The Call Is Cheap. The Wiretap Is Extra.
Begin forwarded message:
From: "John F. McMullen" <observer@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: August 22, 2004 11:04:54 PM EDT
To: johnmac's living room <johnmacsgroup@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: Dave Farber <farber@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>, Declan McCullagh
<declan@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: The Call Is Cheap. The Wiretap Is Extra.
From the New York Times --
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/23/technology/23wiretap.html
The Call Is Cheap. The Wiretap Is Extra.
By KEN BELSON
At first glance, it might seem like the simple extension of a standard
tool in the fight against the bad guys.
But in fact, wiretapping Internet phones to monitor criminals and
terrorists is costly and complex, and potentially a big burden on new
businesses trying to sell the phone service.
Earlier this month, the Federal Communications Commission voted
unanimously to move forward with rules that would compel the businesses
to make it possible for law enforcement agencies to eavesdrop on
Internet calls.
But developing systems to wiretap calls that travel over high-speed
data networks - a task that the companies are being asked to pay for -
has caused executives and some lawmakers to worry that helping the
police may stifle innovation and force the budding industry to alter
its services. That requirement, they say, could undermine some of the
reasons Internet phones are starting to become popular: lower cost and
more flexible features.
The commission's preliminary decision, announced on Aug. 4, is a major
step in the long process of deciding how Internet-based conversations
could be monitored. Regulators will now hear three months of public
testimony on the ruling. Few expect a resolution of the issue this
year, but it is not hard to figure out who will ultimately pay for the
wiretapping capability.
"All the costs carriers incur are ultimately going to be passed on to
the consumer," said Tom Kershaw, vice president for voice-over-Internet
services at VeriSign, which provides surveillance support for Internet
phone companies.
Tapping Internet phones is far more complicated than listening in on
traditional calls because the wiretapper has to isolate voice packets
moving over the Internet from data and other information packets also
traveling on the network.
While traditional calls are steady electronic voice signals sent over a
dedicated wire, Internet calls move as data packets containing as
little as a hundredth of a second of sound, or less than one syllable,
which follow often-unpredictable paths before they are reassembled on
the receiving end to form a conversation.
To make wiretapping possible, Internet phone companies would have to
buy equipment and software as well as hire technicians, or contract
with VeriSign or one of its competitors. The costs could run into the
millions of dollars, depending on the size of the Internet phone
company and the number of government requests.
The requirement to cooperate with law enforcement agencies is unlikely
to drive any Internet phone company out of business, though it could
cut into profits. Last year, the agencies conducted about 1,500
wiretaps, with the bulk of them in major cities like New York and
Miami. The Federal Bureau of Investigation has yet to complete a
wiretap over Internet phone services.
"It doesn't break the business model, but it means free telephone
service is impossible," said John Pescatore, the lead security analyst
at Gartner Inc., a research group. "You might see add-on surcharges."
Internet companies are starting to gear up for the federal
requirements. Many Internet phone companies, including Vonage, which
has the largest number of subscribers, already supply the police with
the phone numbers that a person under court-sanctioned surveillance
dials and the origin of calls he or she receives, plus information
about the connections, like whether a conference call was convened. The
vast majority of court orders for wiretapping involve this kind of
monitoring, known as "trap and trace," which is typically used at the
beginning of an investigation.
The less frequent, but more complicated, monitoring request is to allow
the police to listen to conversations as they occur. In those cases,
the differences between the architecture of traditional
circuit-switched phone networks and the Internet are crucial.
With traditional phone networks, calls are routed through central
circuit-switching stations, which connect long-haul phone networks and
the wires that go into homes and offices. Typically, phone carriers
have installed dedicated servers at or near the switches, which can
isolate conversations from a specific phone number and send them to
police agencies in a standardized format. In 1994, when federal
wiretapping laws were revised, Congress initially set aside $500
million to help carriers pay for this extra equipment to route calls to
the police.
In tapping an Internet phone, police first need to find out which
company is responsible for maintaining the phone number. That could be
a big phone company, a cable company, an Internet phone provider or
peer-to-peer services that match callers but do not aid in the
transmission of the call. Law enforcement agencies could also ask
broadband providers to isolate voice streams on their networks that are
traveling to and from a specific location.
"In the circuit-switch world, the caller and content were in the domain
of a single carrier," said Julius P. Knapp, a deputy chief in the
Office of Engineering and Technology at the Federal Communications
Commission. "In the Internet world, you have to identify who is in the
best position to get the information."
Once the F.B.I. determines the suspect's Internet phone provider, it
orders the company to program its servers to intercept specified calls
to and from the suspect's phone. When a phone call is not tapped, the
server sends the call to its destination. When a call is to be tapped,
the phone company's server instructs an Internet router to make a copy
of the call and send it to the law enforcement agency.
The task is complicated because the phone provider has to use special
software to sniff out specific voice packets from among all the data
packets traveling from the suspect's connection. Unlike traditional
phone taps, this process does not reveal the caller's location, because
users can plug their Internet phone modems into any broadband
connection, even overseas.
But like any security check, this monitoring can slow networks and even
degrade the quality of the call. It could also potentially intercept
data packets along with other types of voice packets - from cellphones,
for example - a possibility that alarms privacy groups worried that the
police will collect information beyond their authority.
"The potential for misuse is pretty broad because what you are doing is
a form of packet-sniffing," said Lee Tien, a staff lawyer at the
Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. "The problem is that
if you are using a sniffer box to perform the interception, you may
handle all the traffic going through. In the end, a packet sniffer gets
you everything."
Some groups, like the American Civil Liberties Union, say law
enforcement agencies are trying to turn phone companies into government
spies. Law enforcement groups and service providers, however, say
software is sufficiently sophisticated to only siphon relevant calls.
They also say that having the companies take charge of finding a
solution should allay suspicion that the government is trying to
overstep its authority.
The F.B.I. is not trying to use the wiretap law "to dip into the
Internet," said one senior official at the bureau.
Another issue involves decoding encrypted conversations. It is easier
to encrypt digital conversations than those in an analog format, and a
growing number of Internet phone providers are encrypting their calls.
Unscrambling the calls requires another piece of software.
"It's an added layer of complexity," said Richard Tworek, the chief
executive of Qovia, which provides software to Internet service
providers to make sure the networks are running properly.
The biggest challenge, Mr. Tworek and others say, is tracking down
phone conversations that are connected by peer-to-peer software. This
software essentially piggybacks on the networks of its users; calls are
not connected at a central location. To trace such calls, investigators
would have to sift through trillions of packets at routers that channel
data around Internet networks - a daunting task, industry experts say.
This type of peer-to-peer calling is still emerging, so the threat is
rather remote. But some companies that offer this software operate
overseas, so they fall outside the jurisdiction of the United States
government. The communications commission's recent ruling does not
cover this type of peer-to-peer communication.
Industry experts, though, expect this decentralized form of Internet
phone service to spread, which will require even more sophisticated
Internet wiretapping solutions. About that challenge, Mr. Tworek could
only say, "It's a huge headache."
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John F. McMullen
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