[VOIPSEC] An issue of trust?

[Simon Horne]

Sorry to intrude...
I guess the big question here is, is VoIP Internet Telephony or Telephony 
on the Internet?

There are 2 recognised standards 1 administered by Internet people (IETF) 
and based on existing Internet technologies to do telephony and 1 
administered by the telephony people (ITU) based on telephony to be carried 
over the Internet.  You can successfully argue it both ways however it 
appears the regulators have chosen to look at it one way and a large pert 
of the industry to look at it another.

Simon

At 10:12 PM 19/06/2006, Randell Jesup wrote:
>"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)
>
>
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