"The FBI and the Justice Department have renewed their efforts to wiretap voice conversations carried across the Internet. "
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Comment-Any language that enables the Federal government to do wiretaps on Voice over IP, is probably going to act as an open door, to being able to legally access other forms of internet communications (o.k., so we already have Echelon and Carnivore that are hungrily gobbling and sorting all kinds of electronic communications).
Slippery slope? I think so.

More from the article---
"But the latest submission, which follows a recent FCC forum on Internet telephony, is more detailed than before and specifically targets VoIP providers as a regulatory focus.

In general, VoIP providers have pledged to work with police, and some, like Level 3 Communications, do not oppose the regulations the FBI is seeking. Others, like a coalition of 12 smaller VoIP providers including BullDog Teleworks and PingTone Communications, have told the FCC that "there are various industry initatives under way and the commission should allow those initiatives time to succeed before preemptively regulating."

Federal and local police rely heavily on wiretaps. In 2002, the most recent year for which information is available, police intercepted nearly 2.2 million conversations with court approval, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Wiretaps for that year cost taxpayers $69.5 million, and approximately 80 percent were related to drug investigations. Those statistics do not include approximately the same number of additional wiretaps authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. "
---------Snip---------------
Commentary - Doing a Mr. Rogers voice "Can you say police state boys and girls? I thought you could."
~Code

Check out
more of the story at CNet

Particularly bizarre to me is this statement from the article :
"One unusual section of the FBI letter is that it claims the bureau is seeking to protect Americans' privacy rights: "Mandatory CALEA compliance by VoIP providers would better protect the privacy of VoIP users than a voluntary approach. CALEA protects the privacy of surveillance suspects by requiring carriers to provision the surveillance in a confidential manner." Otherwise, the FBI argues, a VoIP company might turn over a "full pipe" to police that would include conversations of more people than necessary. "

Tough shit if they can't surveil everything.

Let me get this straight. they will have the right to listen in to our conversations when ever they want in order to protect our privacy.

Is it me or is there a problem here?

"Let me get this straight. they will have the right to listen in to our conversations when ever they want in order to protect our privacy.

Is it me or is there a problem here?"

It's you. Nowhere in the article does it say that they will have the right to listen to conversations "whenever they want". The tapping would fall under the same rules as telephone conversations - the approval of a judge is required.

"The FCC should ignore pleas about national security and sophisticated criminals because sophisticated parties will use noncompliant VoIP, available open source and offshore," said Jim Harper of Privacilla.org, a privacy advocacy Web site. "CALEA for VoIP will only be good for busting small-time bookies, small-time potheads and other nincompoops."

Funny! And probably true.

Not sure, I'm thinking that if there are rules rather than self regulation
then as its says more information might be monitored than is really necessary, therefore your privacy is more protected. If you work on the premise that anything transmitted by electronic means is monitored then you will not be surprised at this article, I guess it is the price we have to pay for freedom and security.

sure , the criminals are going to talk on a open channel after they know feds are listning, there are millions other ways to do encrypted communication.

dont know where they get this bonehead ideas

I see this as no more a problem than intercepting radio/cellphone/satellite/police scanners transmissions. As the courts have said, once a signal hits the airwaves it's there for anyone to receive. Using the internet for phone service is really no different that broadcasting into the air on your cell phone or CB radio as far as privacy and security go.

Anyone who realistically thinks its safe and private on the internet is naive, stupid or ....anyways, I digress. As mroop stated, only small time wannabe criminals are going to get busted with this. The true dangerous folks have and always work around such safeguards.

Most of this publicity is also to create a certain amount of paranoia and such to make folks, (criminals and law abiding citizens) to change their routine.
A lot of so called news articles are planted to create a desired effect on the population.

It's like parking an empty police car on just off of a busy street, everyone slows down, has the desired effect and it costs nothing.

"Anyone who would give up a portion of their liberty for security deserves neither" -poorly job done at remembering something that Benjamin Franklin said.

As for he FBI wanting this, I would rather use PGP or something else to encrypt messages then this e-phone. Stupid terrorists giving gov't a free pass to take liberties away.

"Anyone who would give up a portion of their liberty for security deserves neither" -poorly job done at remembering something that Benjamin Franklin said.

As for he FBI wanting this, I would rather use PGP or something else to encrypt messages then this e-phone. Stupid terrorists giving gov't a free pass to take liberties away.

Moroop

Once again I was having a fit of sarcasam at the industries expense. Until you can understand the difference please treat my posts as if they don't exist. I'm treating yours the same way. that is the only way that you and I can peacefully coexist here.

or should I say the governments expense. same thing anymore

I'm pretty sure George Washington said that, Tassadar. But however it goes, the message is the same.

well thay get these boneheaded ideas from.....

the GUV wants to monater every one but thay can't....so thay settel on monertering any one the courts let them
thay also know thay will not be able to catch taroriest on VOIP
but thats not prepose of this the perpose is to open the door on monotering the whole internet witch is a bad thing.....

THIS IS DANGEROUS.

Because the way internet works, they be able to skirt around the courts.

They probe the internet, they find a potentially "terrorist" conversation, they get a warrant from the judge and changed the dates of said conversations,
No one will be prove otherwise.

They could also change the data of said conversations, and use it against those who speak out against the gov't.

Again, no one will be the wiser.

No one will be (able to) prove otherwise.

" Those who would give up essential liberties for a measure of security, deserve neither liberty nor security."
- Benjamin Franklin

is it true if you say "allah" a bunch of times on a regular telephone, the feds start listening in?

it's quite possible. Keywords are certainly supposed to be one way in which the NSA, through Echelon, decide what to listen to.

What about Counter-Strike? Are they going to tap that? LOL Then you can get busted for terrorism. There is about 20000 ppl on there talking about setting up bombs and shooting people.

If we all started talking like Gilbert Godfried on the phone maybe the wiretappers would shoot themselves in the head after 5 minutes.

Don't worry people, you can always stay ahead of the game... I'm a HAM radio buff, and for a few years now, some of us have been experimenting with Scatter Band Transmission. This is accomplished by breaking the signal into tiny bits, and spitting them out at changing frequencies, against a definate time frame. Only a predetermined recieving radio can put it back together. The ONLY way ANYONE can follow the transmission is if you give them the frequency and time codes. The most anyone else is able to hear is an occasional noise, that happens too fast to usually even be heard at all. So if anyone out here is good at writing programs....there's some money to be made if you can incorporate this idea into a chat, or P2P network.

If the feds do use keyword based monitoring, their false positive rate would make it impractical to monitor all those calls. Anyway, the terrorists would have figured it out by now.

Scatter band? Sounds a lot like spread spectrum. Still, you seem to be refering to encrypting the voip connection? Possible. Some VoIP systems already do, but others could be easily modified with a (standards-bending) extension, which will be supplied in time by either anti-survalience crypto programers or a sompany trying to sell corporate security software.

goldenpi...you're right...spread spectrum, sorry, I'd just gotten up! This is the way to go with it though.