Fergie's Tech Blog

Internet Pioneers: VoIP Wiretapping is Complicated

Grant Gross writes on InfoWorld:

The study [.pdf], co-authored by several people including TCP/IP co-creator Vinton Cerf and former U.S. National Security Agency encryption scientist Clinton Brooks, comes days after a U.S. appeals court upheld the FCC's VOIP wiretapping rules. On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld the ruling, requiring that VOIP providers offering a substitute for traditional telephone service comply with a 1994 telephone wiretapping law called the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).

The FCC did not immediately respond to a request for comments about the ITAA study. But on Friday, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said allowing law enforcement wiretapping of VOIP calls is of "paramount importance" to U.S. security.

Tracking VOIP calls would be more difficult than tracking calls on the traditional telephone network, because VOIP providers have little control over how their calls are routed across the Internet, said Whitfield Diffie, chief security officer at Sun Microsystems Inc. VOIP providers "have no special Internet privileges" to control traffic, said Diffie, one of the study's authors.

posted by Fergie @ 6/13/2006 07:47:00 PM