Fergie's Tech Blog

Feds fund VoIP tapping research

Declan McCullagh writes in C|Net News:

The federal government is funding the development of a prototype surveillance tool by George Mason University researchers who have discovered a novel way to trace Internet phone conversations.

Their project is designed to let police identify whether suspects under surveillance have been communicating through voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)--information that would be unavailable today if people choose to communicate surreptitiously. The eavesdropping technique already has been shown to work with Skype, the researchers say.

"From a privacy advocate's point of view, this is an attack on privacy," Xinyuan Wang, an assistant professor of software engineering and principal investigator, said Tuesday. "From a police point of view, this is a way to trace things."

To translate his research into a tool that could be used by police in a successor version of the FBI's Carnivore system, Wang received a grant of $307,436 from the National Science Foundation this month. The grant calls for the development of a prototype VoIP-tracing application to provide a "critical but currently missing capability in the fight on crime and terrorism."

posted by Fergie @ 8/09/2005 05:30:00 PM