The Electronic Frontier Foundation(EFF), the Electronic Privacy Information Center(EPIC), the American Civil Liberties Union(ACLU) and others are fighting an attempt to extend the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).[1] I believe this fight, though worthy, is doomed to failure. Someone will raise the terrorism issue, how terrorists could use VoIP to avoid detection, and it will be downhill from there.
Which raises the question (Mr.?) Uwe Hermann asks.[2] Given that CALEA will be extended, and that hackers will take advantage of whatever backdoors are introduced, how do we handle this? How can we detect what backdoors are available and defend against them?
- Mr. Dennis O'Reilly. "Could Your VoIP Phone Be Tapped?" Washington Post (online) 2006-01-28. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/27/AR2006012701086.html
- (Mr.?) Uwe Hermann. "How to detect and defeat hardware backdoors and wiretaps?" Blog and homepage of a slightly paranoid Debian developer 2006-02-08. http://www.hermann-uwe.de/blog/how-to-detect-and-defeat-hardware-backdoors-and-wiretaps