Some time soon the FCC is going to once again overstep its bounds and impose their fascism upon the American people by dictating the demands that manufacturers of Voice of IP telephony equipment provide the fascist State with easy access to allow them to wiretap America's honest citizens.

These fascists are expected to issue their demands shortly, demands that would become law 18 months after the fascists release it.

No oversight.

No public commentary.

No Civil rights.

No Constitutional rights.

Just more Bush fascism under the guise of "fighting terror" -- from the same fascist regime that comprises the world's worst terrorist mass murdering butchers bar none.

When will American citizens realize it's too late to oppose these mass murdering butchers?

When the boxcar doors slam shut in their faces?

I suggest using an encrypted Voice over IP application already grandfathered in - PGP fone

http://web.mit.edu/network/pgpfone/

offers choice of encryption method, sound quality and bandwidth usage

(older versions are available for the really paranoid)

Also you can tunnel any TCP and UDP traffic over Zebedee

http://www.winton.org.uk/zebedee/

which I also use

they would have to directly outlaw all forms of private encryption to prevent the use of these applications...

I think wiretap laws around 1996, maybe the telecom act, mandated that there be some fixed excess capacity to wiretap calls through the digital switches.

A few people protested it then, and it didn't have an effect on the legislature. There needs to be a larger movement before these things stop passing.

Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act

http://www.epic.org/privacy/wiretap/

and the 15 point "hit list" they finally passed

I have complete technical documentation of the cell phone implementations of CALEA for different world cellular standards too

Voice over IP is a new beast however and there's no specific ban on encryption like PGP fone (yet)..

If the FCC succeeds in making this law, the open source community should create software to encrypt the conversations over these devices. If the data is encrypted before it passes through the hardware and is decrypted after it passes throught the hardware, it will still be protected from FBI interception. Even if they make this illegal, we should still use it. Fuck the FBI.

"the data" is analog voice and "the hardware" uses firmware not software

"open source" isn't the magical answer to every problem @$100

in this case the firmware would need to be patched assuming the *hardware would even support encryption* and it's not likely to, yet IS likely to be secured against patching and require a custom interface cord



the solution is to use an encrypted Voice over IP application such as PGP fone or an encrypted tunnel like Zebedee (whos source code is available BTW)



You may download the source for Zebedee and the libraries on which it depends.

http://www.winton.org.uk/zebedee/download.html



Again we see turnkey ignorance rarely solves problems or offers real solutions..

Look at how well PGP has done againt S/MIME, which is the "official standard". PGP's not as dominant as it used to be, and S/MIME is in mail clients by default, so, people tend to look at S/MIME as the mail encryption solution.

I don't know this law, but I imagine it requires encrypted communications to be tappable. So, they'll include encryption that doesn't stop the FBI from tapping you, and people will use it, and never overcome the learning curve to install additional ecnryption.

And, even if they do, then anyone using this additional layer of encryption will be hauled in for using it.

they've attempted to do just that - outlaw all other types of encryption except that which has a back door, for years (a few countries actually do) but never came close to succeeding here due to business interests (I was hoping you would follow that epic link and see just who it was that objected to CALEA)

The patriot act II has a provision that makes the use of encryption in furtherance of a crime an additional penalty - that's as close as they've come here

the whole issue pivots on hardware v software - CALEA mandates backdoored encryption in firmware but software running on general purpose computers is "exempt" (actually it's impossible to enforce)

one reason is stenography

as to learning curves network administrators can tunnel VoIP traffic transparently rendering end user requirements moot (exactly what I do and exactly what Zebedee is for)

the local network topology and security policies remain outside law enforcement control as software while multible VoIP hardware traffic is multiplexed (shared pipe) over said tunnels

basicly VPN..

I do this, I keep no logs and only I know who is where - what private IP is routed to who/where



So it doesn't require everybody to learn/know - it only takes 1 person to set it up *for* everybody..

while true the vast majority of VoIP users would never bother to use anything beyond the default turnkey (or in this case pick up the handset) system/settings and that CALEA mandates access, the network that VoIP uses can through the effort of a single person provide some measure of protection transparently for them

-the options I posted are for both users and administrators, both legal and useful too



ps - PGP fone is remarkably easy to use compared to PGP for e-mail, you should check it out..