Well, only one problem with wiretapping the internet..any good net to net phone program
worth using has built-in encryption and to break such is currently against the law under
the DMCA to break...So, if it is discovered by any individuals of such..so sorry...


"Ethic" <nospam@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:3f3a8136$0$6186$5402220f@news.sunrise.ch...
| Wednesday, August 13, 2003
| By Declan McCullagh, Staff Writer, CNET News.com
|
|
| FBI targets Net phoning
|
|
| Internet phone calls are becoming a national security threat that must
| be countered with new wiretap rules, according to an FBI proposal
| presented to regulators this month.
|
| Internet telephone calls are fast becoming a national security threat
| that must be countered with new police wiretap rules, according to an
| FBI proposal presented quietly to regulators this month.
|
| Representatives of the FBI's Electronic Surveillance Technology Section
| in Chantilly, Va., have met at least twice in the past three weeks with
| senior officials of the Federal Communications Commission to lobby for
| proposed new Internet eavesdropping rules.
|
| The FBI-drafted plan seeks to force broadband providers to provide more
| efficient, standardized surveillance facilities and could substantially
| change the way that cable modem and DSL (digital subscriber line)
| companies operate.
|
| The new rules are necessary, because terrorists could otherwise
| frustrate legitimate wiretaps by placing phone calls over the
| Internet, warns a summary of a July 10 meeting with the FCC that
| the FBI prepared.
|
| "Broadband networks may ultimately replace narrowband networks,"
| the summary says. "This trend offers increasing opportunities
| for terrorists, spies and criminals to evade lawful electronic
| surveillance."
|
| In the last year, Internet telephony (also called voice over Internet
| Protocol, or VOIP) has grown increasingly popular among consumers and
| businesses with high-speed connections. Flat-rate plans cost between
| $20 and $40 a month for unlimited local and long-distance calls.
|
| One of the smaller VOIP providers, Vonage, recently said it has about
| 34,000 customers and expects to have 1 million by late 2004.
|
| According to the proposal that the FCC is considering, any company
| offering cable modem or DSL service to residences or businesses would
| be required to comply with a thicket of federal regulations that would
| establish a central hub for police surveillance of their customers.
|
| The proposal has alarmed civil libertarians who fear that it might
| jeopardize privacy and warn that the existence of such hubs could
| facilitate broad surveillance of other Internet communications such
| as e-mail, Web browsing and instant messaging.
|
| Under existing federal wiretapping laws, the FBI already has the
| ability to seek a court order to conduct surveillance of any broadband
| user though its DCS1000 system, previously called Carnivore.
|
| But the bureau worries that unless Internet providers offer surveillance
| hubs based on common standards, lawbreakers can evade or, at the very
| least, complicate surveillance by using VOIP providers such as Vonage,
| Time Warner Cable, Net2Phone, 8X8, deltathree and DigitalVoice.
|
| Digital wiretapping
| The origins of this debate date back nine years, to when the
| FBI persuaded Congress to enact a controversial law called the
| Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA.
|
| Louis Freeh, FBI director at the time, testified in 1994 that emerging
| technologies such as call forwarding, call waiting and cellular phones
| had frustrated surveillance efforts.
|
| Congress responded to the FBI's concern by requiring that
| telecommunications services rewire their networks to provide
| police with guaranteed access for wiretaps.
|
| Legislators also granted the FCC substantial leeway in defining
| what types of companies must comply. So far, the FCC has interpreted
| CALEA's wiretap-ready requirements to cover only traditional analog
| and wireless telephone service.
|
| "I think the FCC has a lot of room here," said Stewart Baker, a partner
| at Steptoe & Johnson who represents Internet service providers.
|
| "CALEA was written knowing that there would be new technologies for
| telecommunications." Baker, the former general counsel of the National
| Security Agency, said it was not clear whether the FBI had yet been
| frustrated by problems when wiretapping VOIP calls.
|
| Derek Khlopin, regulatory counsel at the Telecommunications Industry
| Association, whose members include Cisco Systems, Ericsson, Lucent
| Technologies, Motorola and Nortel Networks, said what the FBI is
| "worried about is, when you have voice over DSL, if there's a way
| someone could say they're not subject to CALEA."
|
| In a letter to the FCC, the FBI wrote: "CALEA applies to telecommunications
| carriers providing DSL and other types of wire line broadband access."
|
| Some members of Khlopin's trade association, such as Cisco, already
| manufacture products that follow CALEA guidelines. Khlopin said his
| group did not have a position on the FBI's request, but suggested that
| "CALEA is not the only way that law enforcement can get the bad guys."
|
| The FBI's proposal has drawn criticism in regard to privacy issues.
|
| A representative of DSL provider Speakeasy said the company "does not
| support the extension of CALEA to ISPs, because the proposal appears
| to run counter to our commitment to protect our subscribers' privacy
| first and foremost. We certainly will be closely monitoring the
| progression of this particular proposal."
|
| Barry Steinhardt, director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)'s
| technology and liberty program, said the FCC could not legally extend
| CALEA to cover the Internet without additional action by Congress.
|
| "CALEA does not apply to 'information services,' which was the then
| term of art for the Internet," Steinhardt said. "Voice over IP is just
| that, a voice service over the Net. CALEA should not, and so far has
| not, applied to VOIP."
|
| The FBI proposal is before the FCC, which has jurisdiction over DSL
| and cable modem providers and is expected to rule on the matter this
| fall. "It's pending before the commission, and we plan to address the
| question," an FCC spokesman said.
|
| How to follow the law
| It's unclear what a broadband provider must do if the FCC extends CALEA's
| reach, and the regulations survive a possible court challenge from
| privacy groups such as the ACLU or network providers who do not wish
| to comply.
|
| Martin King, an attorney in the FBI's general counsel's office who
| attended the July 10 meeting, said the bureau would not elaborate on
| its request to the FCC. "On this particular matter, we are going to
| decline to comment," King said.
|
| Colleen Boothby, a former FCC official who is now a partner at Levine,
| Blaszak, Block & Boothby, said the implications of the FBI's proposal
| would vary based on how a broadband provider's system is configured.
|
| "It's going to depend on what facilities they have," Boothby said.
| "When designing systems and configuring software and hardware, they
| have to preserve the government's ability to eavesdrop. Does it mean
| physical electrical closets ? Does it mean an extra server in a secure
| room ? It means as many varied things as there are variations in
| network design."
|
| Lawrence Plumb, a spokesman for Verizon Communications, said: "How does
| a service provider architect its broadband network and equipment to be
| CALEA-compliant ? The exact answer to 'how' isn't known."
|
| Companies would be reimbursed for their costs to comply with CALEA.
| When enacting the law, Congress earmarked $500 million to reimburse
| telephone and cellular providers for their expenses.
|
| Police encountered similar problems when wiretaps on customers using
| data services such as mMode from AT&T Wireless and PCS Vision from
| Sprint PCS could intercept only voice communications. Earlier this year,
| VeriSign, Cisco and other members of an industry consortium announced
| a set of products that would permit police to eavesdrop on wireless
| data transmissions.
|
| FBI meetings
| The FBI appears to have first presented its proposal to the FCC last
| year. But in the July 10 and July 22 meetings, the bureau extended it
| to say that if broadband providers cannot isolate specific VOIP calls
| to and from individual users, they must give police access to the
| "full pipe" -which, by including the complete simultaneous communications
| of hundreds or thousands of customers, could raise substantial privacy
| concerns.
|
| A summary of the meeting prepared by the FBI said the FCC could
| "require carriers to make the full pipe available and leave law
| enforcement to perform the required minimization. This approach is
| already used when ISPs provide non-CALEA technical assistance for
| lawfully ordered electronic surveillance."
|
| The July 22 meeting at the FCC included John Pignataro, deputy
| superintendent of Maryland's state police force, two attorneys for
| the FBI's Electronic Surveillance Technology Section, and Leslie
| Szwajkowski, the head of that section's policy unit. They met with
| a senior advisor to FCC Commissioner Kevin Martin. During the July
| 11 meeting, FBI representatives met with 10 officials from the FCC's
| Wireline Competition Bureau, its Media Bureau and the Office of
| Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis.
|
| The meetings, according to summaries prepared by the FBI, stressed
| that "broadband telephony involves packet-mode communications, which
| are more difficult to intercept than circuit-mode communications.
|
| The need for CALEA-standardized broadband intercept capabilities is
| especially urgent in light of today's heightened threats to homeland
| security and the ongoing tendency of criminals to use the most
| clandestine modes of communication."
|
| In an interview, however, a Vonage representative said the VOIP
| provider had never received a request from a police agency to do
| a live voice interception, though the company has been served with
| subpoenas for stored customer information. "We have been subpoenaed,
| I believe, several times for call records and call data," Vonage's
| Brooke Schulz said. "We've responded to those subpoenas very, very
| quickly. Because of the way our service is set up, we have all this
| data on hand, and it's very easy to do."
|
| Schulz said if Vonage were to receive a proper request to perform a
| live voice interception, it would be trivial to comply with, because
| all the company's VOIP calls flow through central servers. "We are
| able to copy the data stream and send it in tandem to another location,
| " Schulz said. "You can essentially send it to the law enforcement
| agency you need to send it to, as long as they have the proper
| equipment and the proper interconnect."
|
| Because Vonage's network already is accessible to police armed with a
| legal wiretap order, Schulz said she was mystified by the FBI's
| proposal to the FCC. "We really don't know where it's coming from,"
| she said.
|
| Why the proposal ?
| The FBI declined to elaborate on the justification for its proposal.
| An FBI agent who attended the pair of meetings and spoke on condition
| of anonymity said that "if it's pending, we don't want to be talking
| about it."
|
| One explanation for the proposal is that not all VOIP networks flow
| through a service that can be readily wiretapped. For instance,
| Pulver.com's Free World Dialup connects about 38,000 subscribers in
| 150 countries who typically use Cisco ATA-186 and Cisco 7960 VOIP
| phones to talk to each other directly.
|
| The best place to intercept those types of VOIP calls would likely
| be at the user's broadband provider.
|
| A second explanation for the FBI's proposal is that, by requiring
| broadband providers to comply with CALEA, police would have an easier
| time wiretapping other types of Internet communications such as e-mail,
| Web browsing and instant-messaging services.
|
| David Sobel, general counsel of the Electronic Privacy Information
| Center, said : "It seems that current practices are providing the
| government with full access" to VOIP calls.
|
| Baker, the CALEA attorney at Steptoe and Johnson, said: "It would be
| very difficult to set up a network so that you could only intercept
| voice packets and not the others. The likely result here is that you'll
| have modifications that are useful for law enforcement not just for
| voice packets but for other packets as well."
|
| Yet another reason for the FBI's proposal, Baker said, is that the
| bureau is very interested in details about a VOIP phone call, not just
| the conversation itself. Those details, such as who was on the call,
| are called "punch list items" according to CALEA. "It's not about
| content but about getting call-identifying information or traffic
| analysis," Baker said. "Who was on the line, how long they stayed on,
| who did they put on hold--things like that. The FBI has always wanted
| to get that information served up very neatly, promptly and conveniently."
|
| Some Internet providers have welcomed the FBI as an ally on this issue,
| which has arisen as part of an FCC proceeding over broadband deregulation
| and how to classify Internet access. By lobbying the FCC, the bureau is
| essentially seeking to expand the scope of CALEA, which says
| telecommunications
| services must ensure that their equipment and facilities are capable of
| "expeditiously isolating and enabling the government, pursuant to a
| court order or other lawful authorization," to intercept all communications
| from a specific customer.
|
| FCC Chairman Michael Powell has indicated that he would like to move
| more Internet access services into the category of "information
| services," which have fewer regulations and likely would not be subject
| to CALEA. That alarms DSL providers such as EarthLink, which fear that
| deregulation means that former Baby Bells such as Verizon and BellSouth
| will raise their rates for access to the copper wire that runs to
| telephone subscribers' homes.
|
| "The FBI is really an ally of sorts," said David Baker, EarthLink's
| vice president for law and public policy. "They're saying to the FCC,
| look, you guys are thinking of classifying everything as an information
| service, but you have to be aware of the implications."
|
| EarthLink's Baker said "we're already seeing anticompetitive activities
| on the part of the phone companies even under the current rules. You do
| away with those rules, and you're ensuring that customers will have no
| choice but DSL provided by the phone company."
|
| Unless the FBI's proposal succeeds, he said, "everything that travels
| over a DSL connection, be it voice or e-mail, would be out of the
| reach of law enforcement. That would be a tremendous loophole and a
| breach of national security."
|
| http://www.businessweek.com/technolo...es/5056424.htm
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