If you don’t yet believe that individual liberties are being continually eroded, wait till you hear this one. The United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (otherwise known as the Future Supreme Court Justices of America), in its infinite wisdom, recently upheld an FCC regulation that requires providers of Voice Over IP (VOIP) technology to offer mechanisms to allow law enforcement to trace their phone calls.

VOIP is a technology that was just bound to happen. The idea is to bypass traditional phone lines and use the worldwide Internet infrastructure to place phone calls. It’s a remarkable paradigm shift since there is no notion of “long distance” over the Internet, it costs the same for a New Yorker to browse a web site in Boston as a site in Sydney, Australia. Similarly, when you’re using VOIP it costs the same to place a phone call to Kansas or to Uganda. You can imagine what traditional long distance carriers think about that idea.

Currently, there is no traditional method available for tracing phone calls made using VOIP, since the Internet uses a completely different technology for routing data packets. Phone switches know a lot about the data that they’re routing, and that information is easy to hand over to the police. That’s why it’s so easy for phone calls to be traced. Internet routers aren’t that smart. Enter law enforcement. In order to make sure they’re able to listen in on ALL our phone calls, the government recently got the FCC to implement the regulation requiring VOIP providers to have call traceability in place by 2007. The problem is, any system that makes it easy to conduct surveillance on VOIP calls means that it’s going to be just as easy to monitor everyone’s Internet traffic. This is a really bad idea for two reasons. First, it will crush VOIP providers who will be forced to spend huge sums of money researching new technologies that will allow easy tracing of Internet-routed packets. But the bigger problem in my view is what this means for the Internet. All Internet usage will be traceable, just like your phone calls. And that means that the government will also be “listening in” on your browsing.

Adding to this problem is the reality that the Internet is global, it’s not a U.S. institution. How can the U.S. require global VOIP providers to comply? They can’t. The result will be that all VOIP business will go to international firms located in countries not stupid enough to do what we’re doing. All U.S. VOIP companies (e.g., Cisco, Vonage) will lose this business.

Smart, eh?

And in the event the NSA doesn’t find any terrorists using VOIP, don’t worry, the effort won’t be wasted. It won’t be long before police are using this development to monitor all Internet usage in order to find out who’s browsing pornography.

One critic of this development is Vinton Cerf, one of the people credited with creating TCP/IP, the protocol that drives the Internet. Cerf recently spoke out against the FCC provision, citing huge security concerns. I was struck by what was missing in his criticism: any complaint that our individual privacy rights are deteriorating.

But I guess that train left the station long ago.

Read the story here.

RP

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 28th, 2006 at 8:13 pm and is filed under News, You Won't Believe This. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.