I won’t be the first or last to comment on this week’s FCC preliminary ruling that VoIP and push-to-talk services are to be subject to US wiretap laws.
Now, as many have pointed out elsewhere, some of this is a bit silly. A SIP session as part of PSTN-style VoIP call is to be wiretapped. But if I create an address book entry in my instant messenger with a single data field of your phone number, hook up to an ENUM server, and make a SIP call, we’re in the clear to talk about drug deals and car hijackings. Each time it’s select number, make call, talk. Crazy.
But here’s the real probem. Tapping the wire is history. It’s an obsolete metaphor, just like “dialling” a number is. Unfortunately, the legacy language we use can mislead our ability to reason. When the action has moved from the middle of the network to the edge, there’s little advantage to tracking encrypted packets whizzing through the middle. Intercept of the media channel, the “conversation”, is going to be history at some point within 10-20 years. You’re going to have to revert to old-fashioned analog eavesdropping of people’s homes and cars, and secretly modify their PCs to capture the keystrokes.
But you shouldn’t care, because that’s not the important bit. The state’s monopoly on the legal use of violence ensures there will be ways and means of forcing physical intercept. Here’s what really matters. Before you want to know what the baddies said, you want to know who they are and where they are. And that’s a more tractable problem. Fortunately, even the bad guys have a weak spot. They need to find each other first. And to do that they need to use public network services as well as public networks.
There are three core services that they can and must access. What’s the physical network address of the other guy (directory services), what’s his availability to communicate (presence) and is this really the person I think it is calling me (identity services).
Take these public network functions away from the mix and the bad guys have a problem. They need to create their own, private application-layer communications networks. When you can’t use the Skype authentication server, Yahoo presence server or AOL directory, you’ve got a problem. Many won’t have the technical ability, and those that do will be severely constrained. The bigger the “secret” network, the less secret it becomes. Newbies need to be configured. Contacts who get whacked or jailed need credentials revoked. It’s like your worst nightmares of running a PKI server, factorial exponential.
The way out from the conumdrum of whether to wiretap VoIP is to understand it’s the wrong question. There’s a paradox at the heart of the wiretap concept. Wiretapping is aimed at real-time communications. These are connection-oriented; there is a session in place. But session encryption is (now) easy. Store-and-forward data encryption is hard, because you need to involve all sorts of third party key management and directory services. The very data you want to intercept is the least likely to be interceptable on an Internet-style network.
Any real-time communication that isn’t stored gets encrypted end-to-end before being viewed and discarded. That’s the reality within the lifetime of the laws and regulations being enacted. It’s the reality today for most voice conversations between members of my family. Only the chronically inept will get caught from an old-fashioned wiretap.
So we’ll see a shift in focus from the real-time intercept of transient data on the fly, to after-the-event recovery of transaction data. The real questions are do we force all intermediary application services to retain and hand over copies of stored messages and transactions? And if not, is there a well-defined subset of those service capabilities that should be intercepted? My take is “maybe” and “yes”.
Ultimately there’s little in principle to choose between a Patriot Act request today for the library book transactions, and a future request for your history of ENUM lookups. We’re already heading to the point of law enforcement being able to “intercept at the edges” and request any stored application data. The clear danger is that this leaves the citizen with few protections against an overbearing state. It’s like the right to bear arms being anulled in cyberspace. No citizen may ever have a secret information resource in their posession that poses a threat to the power of the state.
As our current enemies are demonstrating, the real war is one for mindshare and morale, and it’s one fought primarily with (dis)information. The expenditure of airplanes, explosives and bullets are the “content” for the formation of public opinion. So I’d personally rather we demonstrated our commitment to freedom by not readily forcing the exposure of every thought ever captured electronically. We’re trying to sell the prospect of a free society to those who currently lack one. Is surveillance by default of all stored data compatible with that?
That said the core routing services — directory, presence and identity — are clearly defineable and limited in scope. A reasonable trade-off is to make it easy for the state to know who is associating with whom, even if the state has no knowledge of the purpose of the interaction.
At the very least, I’d feel more secure if we didn’t pretend the most dangerous terrorists and criminals were incapable of deploying the same strong encryption my mother uses to talk to me.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 01:50 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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Seeking Intelligent Presence from Unbound Spiral
Packet Pick Pockets is the best review I've seen on the FCC ruling this last week. I alluded to this in my FCC post, Martin just says it so much better. The way out from the conumdrum of whether to...
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Why are you not out in front in the VOIP start up game, you seem to be the most forward thinking guy i have found on this subject, keep it up, RM
Posted by: at August 7, 2004 06:27 AMI agree with you that regulators need some kind of paradigm/ mind shift to understand the impact of VoIP. Why is there so much discussion about wiretabs in the U.S.? I recently studied a report of the European Commission, see http://chaorde.blogspot.com. Why is there no discussion in the U.S. about the issues this report decribes? The Regulatory Framework of the U.S. shouldn't be that different compared with the EU?
Hotze