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U.S. Government Issues Report on VoIP Security Holes 112

Posted by CowboyNeal from the good-bad-and-ugly dept.
ranson writes "PC World is reporting on VoIP technology's threat of being manipulated by hackers, through call interception and DoS attacks on users' internet connections. While these threats are nothing new, the article cites an interesting government report on the topic, as well as its author, who believes a VoIP user's best protection is security by obscurity."
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U.S. Government Issues Report on VoIP Security Holes More

U.S. Government Issues Report on VoIP Security Holes

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  • VOIP calls aren't encrypted? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Motherfucking Shit ( 636021 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @12:15AM (#12448589) Journal
    From the article:
    Intercepting Internet traffic is not new. Neither is DoS. But unlike more secure Internet transactions such as your Web connection for online banking, VoIP calls are not encrypted. That makes them susceptible to tapping.
    This amazes me, I can't believe that the calls are floating around in raw audio. Would a little encryption add so much overhead that it would bog down the system? Or is this due to CALEA or other laws?

    • Re:VOIP calls aren't encrypted? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Spetiam ( 671180 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @12:24AM (#12448624) Journal
      Skype says its calls are encrypted.

      The calls... are highly secure with end-to-end encryption. [skype.com]

      Whether their scheme is snake oil or for real, I don't know, as I can't find any documentation on it, much less source code.

      • Re:VOIP calls aren't encrypted? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by IWannaBeAnAC ( 653701 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @12:55AM (#12448740)
        If there is no documentation, then it is almost certainly snake oil.

        Anyway, it is hard to imagine the FBI allowing ordinary consumers to have encryption they cannot break on their telephone calls. Moderately easy to break, but obscure, encryption is exactly what they would be looking for. 99% of criminals will be too dumb to break it, and the other 1% are needed to justify the homeland security budget.

        • Re:VOIP calls aren't encrypted? (Score:5, Insightful)

          by CodeBuster ( 516420 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @01:22AM (#12448842)
          The Rijndael algorithm, with is now the federal advanced encryption standard (AES), is a fast symmetric block cipher which is both public domain and spreading quickly in use. It would not be difficult for the phones to use a public key scheme such as RSA to exchange a session key for Rijndael. The FBI doesn't waste their time intercepting your network traffic and cracking the encryption by brute force computation. They simply bug the keyboard or the room and recover your key. Why waste time picking a complicated lock when you can easily steal the key?
          • And how is 'bugging the keyboard or the room' going to find about my RSA key? I don't type it; I don't even know it. Same goes for Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Bugging the room don't cut it.
            • They bug the room for audio conversations that you have when you use your IP phone. You do speak when you have a phone conversation don't you? Perhaps you are deaf and use the keyboard or teletype terminal instead. In either case a bug of the appropriate type can be used to either eavesdrop on the audio conversation or intercept the keystrokes. The point was that physical access to your hardware, which the FBI can almost certainly arrange, trumps transmission security arrangements such as encryption.
          • And what happened to this fine Orwellian plan? I'd sure hate to think our boys in black would have to trudge out to the field and muck around with hardware when they could cyberjack some ICE on their shiny Unix systems (in 3D).
        • "Anyway, it is hard to imagine the FBI allowing ordinary consumers to have encryption they cannot break on their telephone calls"

          Maybe I can tell you a little secret? WORLD does not equal USA. And VOIP is not a US-only thing.

          So FBI can scream all they want. We can still have encryption in the FREE world.
      • Easy to find out, capture the payload, push it through an iLBC channel and listen if there is any recognizable sound.
        • Uh, what are you talking about? There are other codecs other than iLBC (a-law, u-law, TrueVoice, CELP, etc.). The GrandStream Budgetone-100 phones, for instance, default to a/u-law.

          There is more difficulty than you assume in the process intercepting RTP/RTSP traffic and playing back the audio data.

      • Re:VOIP calls aren't encrypted? (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 06, 2005 @02:22AM (#12449021)
        Any system which hides key management completely is snake oil, to a certain extent. Encryption without authentication is useless, and the best authentication you can get with completely hidden key management is that an attacker has to be in the middle from the start and all the time to be undetectable. Better than nothing, but not really secure either. The achievable level is about the same as an SSH account where you never check if the server fingerprint is OK.

    • Re:VOIP calls aren't encrypted? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Bananatree3 ( 872975 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @12:25AM (#12448631)
      According to Skype's FAQ [skype.com], all of their VoIP calls are encrypted:

      Calls between Skype software users (PC-to-PC calls) are secure and encrypted. Calls to standard telephone or mobile numbers are encrypted until they reach public switched telephone network. Note that in a conference call where one participant is a PSTN (regular telephone or mobile phone) number/phone number, the padlock icon will not appear indicating that the call is not encrypted.

    • That is a very good point, also we may want to consider the implications for the patriot act. Would this fall under the internet guidelines, or the phone guidelines, or neither?

    • Re:VOIP calls aren't encrypted? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The fact that you know what calea is, says that you already know more than you are letting on. Yes, the average /.er knows about the patriot act, but few know about calea.

      But for the record, calea has nothing to do with VOIP/SIP being encrypted or not. It was more about keeping it simple. Then you are free to add encryption at a lower layer. Much easier to add encryption just prior to the net.

    • My VoIP calls are secure. (Score:4, Funny)

      by raehl ( 609729 ) <raehl311@@@yahoo...com> on Friday May 06, 2005 @01:14AM (#12448824) Homepage
      Iay cryptenay ithway igpay atinlay.
    • There are standards for running encryption on top of SIP (see SRTP), but almost nobody implements them. Much more common is to avoid running SIP on the open Internet -- my company uses SIP for VoIP, but we only run it within a closed LAN or tunneled through OpenVPN.

    • Re:VOIP calls aren't encrypted? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Talennor ( 612270 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @01:35AM (#12448882) Journal
      CALEA says:

      "ENCRYPTION- A telecommunications carrier shall not be responsible for decrypting, or ensuring the government's ability to decrypt, any communication encrypted by a subscriber or customer, unless the encryption was provided by the carrier and the carrier possesses the information necessary to decrypt the communication."

      Which in my first glance at this means that VoIP can be encrypted, though if the carrier handles too much of the private key generation, which would be necessary for any non-technical user, the carrier must keep the key for law enforcement use. (I'm thinking that a standalone VoIP phone would need a factory generated key on EEPROM, though software VoIP could use your average PC to generate a key itself.) But then again I'm not even sure if this applies to VoIP since this isn't exactly a service I'm currently familiar with. I'll note though that this is the only place "encryption" came up in a search of the law itself, so there's not much more to look at than the above quote. However, what the FBI and FCC have done in regulations may be a totally different matter. Can anyone clear this up more or is it just a regulatory mess?
    • Ain't this grand?

      6-8 weeks ago I exchanged email with Vonage on this very subject. What security protocols do they follow for protecting signaling/bearer traffic? big black hole getting meaningful information - but was _assured_ they used 256 bit encryption with a xx bit nonce. Now I read a Vonage representative is asserting they do not perform encryption? Somebody was not telling the truth.

      Regarding CALEA: when you make a phone call (UMTS,GSM,VoIP- doesn't matter), your connection is routed via a switch.
      • What security protocols do they follow for protecting signaling/bearer traffic? big black hole getting meaningful information - but was _assured_ they used 256 bit encryption with a xx bit nonce.

        Perhaps they were discussing digest authentication used for signaling? (It's not strong by any means -- requests can be read and modified in flight even though the password is protected from interception; it's literally the exact same mechanism used for HTTP Digest authentication).
    • Would a little encryption add so much overhead that it would bog down the system?

      I can't imagine why it would. All you need to do is add a little "lock" icon in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. That's - what? 100 pixels of overhead? Practically nothing.

      • I've scanned over the replies, and haven't seen this mentioned.

        Don't assume that the difficult part of the "encryption" requires the plaintext. All you really need (and this is what GSM/UMTS does) is a way to "agree" on a psuedo-random number sequence. You can pre-generate that sequence (within certain constraints) and apply it by an xor to the plaintext. The receiving end does the same.

        How do you agree on a psuedo random sequence? You run AES (or any block cipher) in one of its feedback/chaining modes. A

  • Discussed on the Vonage VoIP Forum (Score:5, Informative)

    by kamikaze-Tech ( 871353 ) * on Friday May 06, 2005 @12:16AM (#12448593)
    This has been discussed at great lengths on the Vonage VoIP Forum here: http://www.vonage-forum.com/ftopic5604.html [vonage-forum.com] and also here: http://www.vonage-forum.com/ftopic3422.html [vonage-forum.com]

  • 99 Pages, and a bitch aint one (Score:4, Funny)

    by MikeSingee ( 881775 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @12:18AM (#12448601)
    Chances of slashdoters reading that 99 page government report are about the same as VoIP being secure.
  • Dang! Looks like its time to get rid of my SunRocket account! Anyone know how secure are those vOIP boxes? For e.g. I can log on to my friend's box with the default password 'welcome' (only for SunRocket).

  • stop the presses! (Score:4, Funny)

    by to_kallon ( 778547 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @12:25AM (#12448636)
    "As VoIP is rolled out en masse, we're going to see an increased number of subscribers and also an increased number of attackers," says David Endler, chairman of the VoIP Security Alliance

    it's easy to see he's an expert. i mean, who else could come up with such an idea? the very premise of it is far-fetched to the point of hillarity. to think that as a product becomes more widely used it is targeted by a larger population...craziness.

  • Damned if you do, damned if you don't (Score:3, Insightful)

    by wcitech ( 798381 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @12:34AM (#12448671)
    I can find a little bit of humor in the situation... If the government finds that a communications system is insecure, they make reports complaining about it (motivating engineers to secure it). If the government finds that a communications system is too secure, they go to court so they can tap into it. (remember the voip wire-tapping ordeal?)
    • I don't particularly see what is so humorous. The government is consistently acting in its own best interest - it wants people to be secure enough to feel safe and not have issues that can be escalated to the government - but it also doesn't want people to be so secure that it can't break them if it is a matter of national security. Would you want Ossama Bin Laden calling you on the phone over the Internet going "Whaazzzup?" without the Government knowing? Corporate/Government Security and consumer privacy
    • The real question is, was it too secure? Or was it FUD designed to encourage bozos to move on over to an easier to crack system? VOIP is actually easier to work with as the processing of empty info has already been cleared out. So what remains is actually useful data and uses much less cycles in tool that is designed to search and modify the packets.

  • VOIP nope not for me (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Grand Facade ( 35180 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @12:39AM (#12448684)
    I'm not giving up my copper! No way! It is protected by law. And it is more insecure than most any other form of communication. But has a high degree of reliablity. So I'm sticking to it.

    Big buisness is who wants VOIP cause they want to get rid of the expensive telcom infrastructure and gain a higher degree of control.
    • I'm not giving up my copper! No way! It is protected by law.

      Give it time. VoIP will become every bit as protected. There's already too much money flowing in the biz to let it go by the wayside now.

      What I think WILL happen is a mass consolidation of most of the current small VoIP companies. Then, of course, prices will rise.

      • What I think WILL happen is a mass consolidation of most of the current small VoIP companies.
        Are you so sure? VOIP companies are not like traditional phone or cable companies, because they don't own the infrastructure. VOIP providers don't dig up roads to bury cable or have an army of technicians in every city. Since there is no big capital investment, what is to stop competition?

        • Are you so sure?

          It's an opinion, but I really do think it'll happen.

          Remember when there was a real choice or ISPs, other than the Bells and Cable? I'm talking regional ISPs. I started on a small, county-wide ISP that went through three purchases before it became part of Covad'soperations.

          Right now I see the VoIP industry in the same place. You get a fairly large choice as far as who your provider can be, but, as things start to get more regulated, the bottom line's only going to get tighter

    • Re:VOIP nope not for me (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 )
      feel free to keep your copper.

      I have switched to VoIP and have 1 copper line incoming for only failover during power outages.

      VoIP, at least from a decent provider can be awesome as soon as you plop an Asterisk box in front of it. ( the crappy providers will not let you use Asterisk so be sure to ask before you buy)

      This gives me services that no phone company on the planet can offer. my phones do not ring after 10pm unless the callerID matches a number in the important list. telemarketers never get thr

      • VoIP, at least from a decent provider can be awesome as soon as you plop an Asterisk box in front of it. ( the crappy providers will not let you use Asterisk so be sure to ask before you buy)

        My provider - Broadvoice - definitely allows you to use an asterisk system, or any other, for that matter, under their BYOD plans. They provide pretty detailed instructions to get you up and running, too. The fact that they don't hide their setup information was the main reason I went with them.

      • I use Broadvoice too, but their reliability sucks. Please let me know if you have experienced otherwise.

        I want them to get their act together, because noone else comes close on price/features when combined with Asterisk.
    • POTS communication can be intercepted with a $100 butt-set and very little skill. How is that more secure?

  • woulda been nice to know it was PDF ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by 2TecTom ( 311314 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @12:40AM (#12448690) Homepage Journal
    ... sigh, here we go again.

    Imagine this, you're far, far away in some distant, lost, Internet cafe. You are deeply in the backwoods of the third world. Your cellular 911, for some reason, isn't working. You see a /. story, with a link to an applicable article. You've just desperately clicked the link to the aforementioned article. Five minutes later, you begin to wonder three different and distinct things.

    1) Is the system locked up?
    2) How much is this going to cost now?
    3) Is that MODEM actually starting to smoke?

    IMHO, PDFs or links, especially unlabelled ones, are less than professional. Please, just say no.

  • Gun in a field (Score:5, Insightful)

    by deathcloset ( 626704 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @12:47AM (#12448708) Journal
    Security through obscurity is one of those strange concepts.

    Imagine every person in the world standing in a gigantic field. In the direct center of everyone is a rifle pointed at the sky.

    When the rifle fires, the bullet will go up and then come down and hit some poor sap. But if one were standing in that crowd one could virtually count one's self out as being crowned that sap.

    Virtually, but not completely.

    That's the problem with security by obscurity. Sure it lowers the chances of being hit. But it's not really security at all.

    Is it?

    • I dunno... it is the basic survival tactic used by all herd animals, and it works for them.
    • Your analogy is not quite right. The only way you would be hit is being in the spot where the bullet lands. It doesn't depend upon how may people are playing, one, two or billions. If you're not in the right (wrong) spot, you will not be hit.

      Of course, the more people who stand on the field, the more likely that SOMEONE will be hit increases.

    • Re:Gun in a field (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MoralHazard ( 447833 )
      This is a great explanation, and ought to be modded up. I guess you would call it a kind of collective action problem.

      Each individual looks at the situation and determines that their own costs are very, very low--while getting hacked/shot is annoying, the odds of it happening a pretty outside. Taking the "cost" as being the actual cost of an incident times the likelihood of an incident, and you get a pretty low number.

      But considering the same question from a group point-of-view, it's not a question of w
    • By your analogy, if you get rid of all the other people in the field, your chances of being hit are still the same. That's not the way security through obscurity is supposed to work.

      A better analogy of security through obscurity is you have a guy standing on a tower in the middle of a field with a rifle and one bullet. If you're the only guy in the field, it's going to be you. By filling the field with other people, you virually guarantee you won't be the one who gets shot.

      Of course, that doesn't mean

    • Re:Gun in a field (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Creepy Crawler ( 680178 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @01:57AM (#12448946)
      Ok, we have "security by obscurity".

      Erm, isnt our current knowledge of encryption technology based much on secret numbers? Well, it is 1 in 2^128 or 2^256 or some huge number, but is this teh similar analogy you use?

      Well, first off security CAN be improved, but it uses the same techniques I use for software protections.

      There should be no meta-data telling what encrypted the data, what encryption schemes, or whatever to even start off. You should consider these to be the first 'shared secrets'. This has a side benefit as when a 3'rd party attempts to decrypt it, it just gives garbage in which SOMETHING has to interpet. It should not be as simple as "GPG v3.2 Diffie-Helman 4096 bit key" does not match .

      Next off, all decrption attempts should go through. What would you rather do: scan the encrypted files for headers in which to try dictionaries OR be forced to try all types of encryption to try to guess which one does what (if you can).

      The next, for network security, is 'knock knock' scripts. Whats safer: login/passwd prompt on ssh OR 10 timed packets aimed at different ports (that change on time of day) that then proceeds to open ssh until disconnect?

      I know what I'd choose if it was my security depended on hiding, firewalling THEN login/passwords.

      The whole point is OBFUSCATION is a valid security mechanism, not that is the end-all be-all or anything, but it does have its places.
    • Dunno; I think a better analogy is the old yarn about two hunters -- an older man and a younger one -- in the woods. They spot bear tracks, and the young guy says to the old one:
      What happens if a bear attacks us?
      The old guy responds, "We run".
      The kid says, "but there's no way you can outrun a charging bear."
      The old man stops, turns to the kid and says, "I don't have to outrun a charging bear; I only have to outrun you."
      So it's not just a matter of standing in a field catching bullets; it's also a matter of

    • When the rifle fires, the bullet will go up and then come down and hit some poor sap.

      I always wondered where did this notion of bullet fired up, coming back and killing someone come from.

      You realize that falling bullet will come to constant speed relatively fast due to air resistance, right? Right?

    • "Don't listen to my f***ing phone calls you goddam inbred motherf***er! If you do, I'll shove a cactus up your ass!"
    • Security through obscurity is one of those strange concepts .... That's the problem with security by obscurity. Sure it lowers the chances of being hit. But it's not really security at all. Is it?

      Security rarely (never?) means 100% secure against all possible attacks. Rather, we consider what attackers are likely to do, what they are motivated to do, what they are capable of doing.

      If someone out there decides I, personally, need to die, and they are motivated and capable of putting serious effort int

  • BSD? (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If they're so worried about this kind of security stuff, why don't they put embedded OpenBSD systems in each of the phones? They'd be virtually uncrackable seeing how pedantic and strict OpenBSD is about ANY code that goes into their -stable branch.
  • I think that the true point is not whether the data is "floating about as raw audio" but rather if the data can be readily collected and made into a readable (listenable) voice stream. Wouldn't that be easier to do if the device itself is hacked, or if the data collection is done at the point where it leaves your machine? I may be wrong, but I think that after about two hops, that data stream is no longer a stream in the ether that is the internet, but is more akin to a vapour trail of directed packets...
  • How do I modify that +1 funny?

  • So what was I supposed to learn? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by modemboy ( 233342 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @01:00AM (#12448769)
    Ok I didn't read the 99 page report (probably some good info in there) but this PC World article is pointless.
    Ok so they can DOS your network connection and kill your VOIP. Uhhh, if you're being succesfully DOS'ed you've got bigger problems than your VOIP not working.
    Oh and the other horror? They can listen to your calls? As the article points out this is currently trivial with the POTS, and again if someone can succesfully listen in on your full network connection you've got bigger problems than your VOIP not working.
    So why should I be scared again? Sounds like anti-VOIP F.U.D. to me.
  • Skype has encryption!

    • Bah! (Score:3, Informative)

      by cduffy ( 652 )
      Yes, it has encryption -- but it's a closed, proprietary solution that's virtually impossible to integrate with anything else.

      Convincing all the SIP implementations to support SRTP is the Right Thing as a long-term solution -- heck, just implementing SRTP support for Asterisk would be a big improvement. As an immediate-term solution (particularly for companies using VoIP to connect with remote users or branch offices), running over a VPN (particularly with IAX trunking if you're connecting branch offices,
  • Since the government can't crack/control it, they release FUD to discourage the public from using the system.

    In this world only the paranoid survive.

  • We need dedicated boxes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by delirium of disorder ( 701392 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @01:47AM (#12448921) Homepage Journal
    As a former phreaker kiddie, http://angelfire.com/linux/the1 [angelfire.com] I know how trivial it is to "tap" or disable someone's phone with physical access to the outside of their home or the TNI in their neighborhood. This is not a major threat, because someone whould have to directly be targeting your phone to 0wn it...and if you knew people (non-government) were after your phone conversations, you can put a lock on the grey customer access box on your house, and ask your CO to secure your TNI. Perhaps someone could theoretically compromise the CO's switching equiptment, but that required either good social engneering or real leet skills. But your phone is just your phone, nothing else, so attacks are limited.

    VOIP is actually more physically secure then PSTN. You can't just hook a speaker up to a DSL line and hear the conversation on it. The problem is, your computer, and every router between you and your VOIP provider, is a general purpose device. Other people and services have access to it for all kinds of legitimate reasons; each of these provides places where people/programs can input data that can potentially directly effect your voice communications or get privilage escilation on the device and indirectly effect it. ANY security person knows to be wary of input! And think of all the ways of getting input to (and theoretically compromising) a PC. What we need is a dedicated physical console for VOIP (a small linksys network device running OpenBSD or Linux and asterix sounds good). The actual VOIP data should be sent through an SSH tunnel or some kind of VPN.

  • I have used this program before to make "secure" point to point voice calls with friends.

    http://www.speakfreely.org/ [speakfreely.org]

    How hard can it be to encrypt packets? How hard can it be to tunnel the VoIP through an SSH tunnel?

    So, my free solution here would be to install OpenSSH (yes there is one for windows and its free) and putty. Then you just redirect the port of the VoIP thing and that's it. You just have another setup like that in the other end.

    http://sshwindows.sourceforge.net [sourceforge.net]
    http://www.chiark.gre [greenend.org.uk]
    • SSH Tunnels for VOIP isn't a very workable solution. It requires me to establish an ssh session with every end-point I want to call or at least the point where my call leaves the 'net & enters the PSTN. This is a serious pain in the ass.

      Perhaps a better solution would be something like x.509 certs. End points identify each other(could elimate caller id spoofing) and the end points generate a couple of random keys to use to encrypt the traffic. Hell, if you don't care about identifying the end-points
      • Yup, something like that. My solution is just for the desperate, the geek that can't wait to encrypt a VoIP conversation and the enthusiast. Of course I mentioned businesses bcause it CAN be done, somehow.

  • Ain't No Magic, here. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by iritant ( 156271 ) <lear.ofcourseimright@com> on Friday May 06, 2005 @04:53AM (#12449430) Homepage
    This report says absolutely nothing new. If you're going to take VoIP seriously, you need to recognize the application's needs. In this case, some amount of QoS is important, particularly at conjestion points such as the last hop to the consumer. You also need to recognize that like any other application on the Internet DDOS is a possibility. Ain't no different.

    On the other hand, IPv6 will solve all our problems, right? ;-)

  • The big problem with VOIP (Score:4, Funny)

    by prisoner ( 133137 ) on Friday May 06, 2005 @08:44AM (#12450140)
    isn't the security. Phone calls haven't been secure since shortly after the first one was made. No, the problem with VOIP is working with the fucking idiot phone vendors who do not understand what they are trying to do. I've gotten several calls from local phone guys who don't understand networking in the least and insist that they've assigned proper IP's to the phones at two seperate locations but they won't talk so it is my network problem. They then inform the customer that the problem is with the network and walk off. The phone at location #1 had an IP of 192.168.39.3 and the phone at location #2 192.168.40.5. No VPN between them. They were trying to route the traffic out over the internet connection.

    These dipshits sell the customer on thsese solutions and then when it doesn't work (routing probs or dropouts from no QOS) they call us in to sell the customer a couple thousand dollars worth of services and hardware to sell the problem. I don't mind the business but working with a customer who is on the brink of becoming an axe murderer isn't pleasant.

  • Sending your calls over VoIP is more difficult to tap. Wiretaps grew by 19% last year [washingtontimes.com] (pops new window) and not a one was turned down.

    VoIP is much tougher to tap by comparison. Remember kids, "Terrorism" is the new "Communism"(tm)
  • The real effect of scaring the public about VoIP is to ensure their information gathering technology still exists 10 years from now. The intellegence departments know that VoIP over encrypted channels will bring an abrupt end to wire tapping.

    "Please, continue to use your local telco, your cell phones, and especially text messaging and email.", some random official might say. "Watching for terrorists has never been so easy!"
    • " The intellegence departments know that VoIP over encrypted channels will bring an abrupt end to wire tapping."

      no, the will install software that intercepts your voice from your pc.

      what it will stop, is random selection of conversations and storing conversations on a giant database to be scan 'just in case'.
  • There is a lot of internet phone companies outthere (Vonage, Net2Phone). I want to get an Internet telephone in my home this month. Which one should I choose?, what is you experience with these different services?

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