VoIP Wiretapping Is For Real: Ready Your Tinfoil Hats!

Tinfoil hatRemember the big hoopla around the NSA and wire-tapping in the USA? Well that was for landline and cell phone calls, although there were alegations that the government had given permission for them to also tap VoIP calls. But between encrypted calls and firewalls many commentators thought that government agencies would be unable to tap a VoIP call, at least for the foreseeable future.

But as I scanned through my collection of RSS feeds this morning, I picked up on one story about a Swiss company called ERA IT Solutions who have developed a new product designed to tap VoIP calls. So what’s new about this? Well, ERA say they will only sell the product to spook agencies. Security software manufacturers won’t be able to buy or license the technology, which means they will not be able to incorporate it into their existing databases or build new tools for VoIP security that could detect it. In effect, any security product on the market will not be able to recognise when a VoIP call is being tapped.

So how will it work?

  1. A judge gives the investigating agency approval for the wiretap.
  2. The spooks install the wiretap software onto the persons computer.
  3. Once installed, any tapped calls are recorded then sent back to a server in small packets to avoid detection.

But that’s not the end of it! This software has some extra surveilance skills under the hood.

According to ERA, firewalls are not a problem. And see that microphone on your laptop? The application can turn it on and record a spoken conversation in the room, then send it back to HQ for further analysis. Given that many microphones have an LED to indicate status, this additional functionality might not be very useful in the real world.
Luckily for us, the app can be pre-programmed to uninstall in the background once any surveilance has been completed. How reassuring.

So if the NSA don’t already have an app like this already, they will very soon. What more can I say, except to get out the tinfoil hats!



8 Comments

  1. Neil Says:
    October 10th, 2006 at 12:36 pm

    I’d never heard of this before….so what does the tinfoil hat do?

  2. Andy Says:
    October 10th, 2006 at 12:46 pm

    Good question shad0w … the easiest way to defeat this new wiretap software is to either

    a) use Linux, or,
    b) use OS X

  3. shad0w Says:
    October 10th, 2006 at 1:02 pm

    Do they have a linux version? or is this just for all those windoze users out there?

  4. Heidi Preston Says:
    October 10th, 2006 at 5:22 pm

    Maybe Stephen Kings’ book the “Cell” wasn’t so far off…Big Brother is here to stay…I believe that was another outragous book at the time.

  5. Heidi Preston Says:
    October 10th, 2006 at 5:27 pm

    Maybe Stephen King’s book “Cell” isn’t so far off. Big Brother is here to stay, I believe that came from another outragous book too. Real life is stranger than fiction or maybe they mimic each other.

  6. Andy Says:
    October 11th, 2006 at 1:11 pm

    I dunno what’s going on at a governmental level. i understand that there is a threat to security, but as a citizen I feel unhappy that a government (either my own, or a foreign government) would go to such lengths to spy on us … not that this is a new phenomenon by any stretch of the imagination.

  7. Daniel Harrison Says:
    May 29th, 2007 at 11:01 am

    I imagine that the US agencies have been doing this for ages already, particularly the CIA and NSA. I imagine that the British government have not been using this though.

  8. Andy Says:
    May 29th, 2007 at 1:39 pm

    Daniel,

    The UK government may not have implemented it on a large scale to cover the entire populous, but they are probably thinking about doing it.

    Look at their past record with security cameras for instance.


Leave a Comment