VoIP has police forces worried
Although Colin Freeze is writing this article in The Globe and Mail from a Canadian perspective, I'm sure it applies equally to intelligence gathering agencies, police departments, and emergency call centers worldwide.
From 911 dispatchers in Winnipeg to counterterrorism sleuths in Ottawa, Canadian law-enforcement agencies are worried about a new technology that is moving telephone conversations onto the Internet.
Voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, greatly diminishes consumer long-distance costs by routing calls through high-speed modems, but police fear it may have an adverse effect on public safety.
Landlines have made it relatively simple for authorities to get a lock on, say, a distressed family reporting a home invasion, or to tap a terrorist's phone line so that they could listen in on orders given to henchmen.
But as such conversations have begun to migrate onto computer networks, and be broken up into encrypted little packets of data that zip wily-nilly around the globe before being put back together again. This means callers' locations are being obscured like never before.
posted by Fergie @ 8/08/2005 07:03:00 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home