S.2281 Hearing (was: Justice Dept: Wiretaps...)
John Curran
jcurran at istaff.org
Mon Jun 21 01:43:32 UTC 2004
At 8:20 PM -0400 6/20/04, John Todd wrote:
>
>I think that while the debate about CALEA's short-term legislative extension to cover VoIP services is certainly interesting and scary, I fail to see how it will be relevant in the coming years as the market progresses. Because of the quickly growing diversity of VoIP technology, interconnection methods, and customer/vendor hierarchies, I do not believe it will be possible to enforce (or even legislate) an interception policy that is effective without extensive and draconian technical and legal methods.
JT -
It's not just the US Goverment with interest in this matter.
Lawful Intercept has basis in both EU directives and laws
of many member states. The last RIPE meeting had a very
good presentation by Jaya Baloo on this particular topic, and
I'll note that describes an ETSI framework for a lot more than
just facilitating VoIP intercept:
<http://www.ripe.net/ripe/meetings/ripe-48/presentations/ripe48-eof-etsi.pdf>
As I noted earlier, the coming reality of abundant, ad-hoc,
encrypted, p2p communication is going to eventually make
efforts to facilitate just VoIP intercept seem quaint, unless
we all recognize that only most obtuse criminal will be likely
to have their communications uncovered in this manner.
There's likely to be disagreement on how far away that day
is; based on different views of technology availability and
criminal behavior. As long as facilitating lawful intercept
has a reasonable cost and perceived benefit tradeoff,
there will be significant pressure to come up with viable
architectures for deployment. In the US, this may take the
direction of simply facilitation of VoIP intercept, or could be
something more inclusive such as the architecture as outlined
by ETSI for mail, transport headers, and entire packet streams.
Finally, it is not simply through tax or regulatory measures that
governments can seek compliance. Not many firms are going to
offer services contrary to law in this area if the consequences
are defined as criminal violations, since most corporate officers
dislike the potential consequences.
/John
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