S.2281 Hearing (was: Justice Dept: Wiretaps...)

Mon Jun 21 18:48:21 UTC 2004

On Mon, 21 Jun 2004, John Curran wrote:
> With respect to enforcement, I am sure there are ways to prevent
> being caught involving amusing offshore logistics, but that will still
> prevent the vast majority of US businesses from offering non-2281
> compliant services.

Off-shore would be the NSA, not the FBI.  The NSA has not reported any
problems tapping VOIP communications.  But the NSA's budget is a lot
bigger than the FBI's :-)

There are lots of examples of extraterritoriality.  MasterCard built a
data center in Europe to process European credit card transactions.  The
US Department of Transportation restricts the use of Canadian train
dispatchers controlling portions of US railroad tracks.  All the telephone
switches serving Palestinian Territory are physically located in Israel.

Several third-world countries have been trying to block the use of
international VOIP.  There aren't that many international networks, with
appropriate pressure, they could block/tap/whatever people trying to use
extraterritorial VOIP.

> I'm not advocating the DoJ's position on this matter, just trying to
> clarify it for the list (since it was rather muddled in earlier postings).

The Department of Justice has been successfully tapping computer networks
since at least 1995.

http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/1996/March96/146.txt

	FEDERAL CYBERSLEUTHERS ARMED WITH FIRST EVER COMPUTER
       WIRERTAP ORDER NET INTERNATIONAL HACKER CHARGED WITH
      ILLEGALLY ENTERING HARVARD AND U.S MILITARY COMPUTERS

  WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The first use of a court-ordered wiretap on
  a computer network led today to charges against an Argentine man
  accused of breaking into Harvard University's computers which he
  used as a staging point to crack into numerous computer sites
  including several belonging to the Department of Defense and
  NASA.

  The wiretap, on the computer of Harvard's Faculty of Arts
  and Sciences during the last two months of 1995, resulted in the
  filing of a criminal complaint against 21-year-old Julio Cesar
  Ardita of Buenos Aires.  An arrest warrant has been issued for
  Ardita.

It is not a technical problem (maybe 5% technical, 95% non-technical).

I don't disagree LEA may have a problem.  However, almost all of the
"problems" identified have been with either money, training for law
enforcement, or non-IP technologies (i.e. push-to-talk on Nextel, which
doesn't require a connection to the PSTN).