October 11, 2006
VoIP Security + Wiretapping
The Swiss government is considering a piece of spyware-like software that would be used for wiretapping VoIP calls. The software would not be available to anyone except agencies, but one question is how it would be installed. Both The Register and TechWorld have written about it. If the Swiss government does this, it begs the question of whether any VoIP recording should ever be admissable in court.
If you've spent anytime on YouTube, you might have seen one of the probably many video mashups of some famous person reciting something, maybe a song. For example, this one of President Bush "singing" the lyrics from the U2 song Sunday, Bloody Sunday, which is about an awful event in Northern Ireland three decades ago. Watching the video, it's obvious that it's been mashed up, doctored, or whatever you want to call it. But had the video portion been removed and the intentional audio hiccups been cleared up, it might have been harder to tell that the audio was not authentic in that form.
Take things a step further, and you can see that with the right equipment, audio "proof" of VoIP phone calls could be concocted to make someone appear guilty of something. A frightening thought. In the wrong hands, people could be convicted something they didn't do. History has show this to have happened to dissidents, and not just in countries outside the USA.
The movie Minority Report, based on a Philip K Dick short story, comes to mind. Falsified VoIP recordings could be used to pre-convict someone. I know I'm simplifying, and I'm fully aware of a wide range of mathematical algorithms for analyzing sound. (I've written my own FFT (Fast Fourier Transform) software to analyze audio and visual signals.) I also don't want to delve too deeply into politics, but I'm concerned about acts like CALEA, and regulations on VoIP.
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