[VOIPSEC] An issue of trust?

[Randell Jesup]

"Geoff Devine" <gdevine at cedarpointcom.com> writes:
>We lived through the denial of calling VoIP with E.164 addressing "data"
>for the last half-dozen years.  It should come as no surprise that your
>"motorcycle" is declared by the regulators to be "car".

You have a point, to be sure - but that's a tough slope to sit on.  Is
E.164 addressing what makes an it a "telephone call"?  And like I said,
where does it end?  And if in the end the logic leads to "all internet
traffic" is subject (and right now that's where the FCC is heading, with
expanding CALEA to ISPs), why not leave the point of monitoring at ISPs,
instead of strung out in hundreds of application domains and providers?
And even without CALEA, communications can be monitored by court order;
CALEA is about requiring service providers to make it easy and in a
neat, easy-to-use form.

What if someone creates a service for IP voice/etc communications that
doesn't use E.164 numbers?  (I.e. IM voice chat, straight SIP-addressed
VoIP, in-game chat, etc.)  What if there's no "number" associated with
the user/endpoint?  For that matter, CALEA regulations are laced with
assumptions about how telephone systems work and what options are available
to users of them.

If law enforcement and legislators want to set up "lawful intercept"
for IP communications, they'd do far better to go and write up such a
bill where it can be targeted correctly for the medium, and be debated
properly.  Using CALEA for pure IP communications is a bit like these
laws:

Motor vehicles may not drive on city streets unless a man with a lantern is
wallking ahead of it.
You must contact the police before entering the city in an automobile.
All cars entering the city limits must first sound their horn to warn the
horses of their arrival.
It is illegal for a woman to drive a car unless her husband is waving a
flag in front of it.
Automobiles are not to pass horse drawn carriages on the street.
(All real, current laws - but more to the point, examples of how they
tried to adapt rules of the road meant for horses to automobiles at first.)

>You're right.  It's a perfect example. :-)


-- 
Randell Jesup, Worldgate (developers of the Ojo videophone), ex-Amiga OS team
rjesup at wgate.com
"The fetters imposed on liberty at home have ever been forged out of the weapons
provided for defence against real, pretended, or imaginary dangers from abroad."
		- James Madison, 4th US president (1751-1836)