Posted on 04/12/2006 12:45:55 PM PDT by teddyruxpin
INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS: Phone Taps Just Got Impossible
April 12, 2006: Eavesdropping on phone calls just got a lot harder. Phil Zimmermann, the guy who invented PGP encryption for Internet mail, has developed a similar product, Zfone, for VOIP (telephone calls over the Internet). Zfone, like PGP, is free and easy to use. PGP drove intelligence agencies nuts, because it gave criminals and terrorists access to industrial grade cryptography. PGP doesn't stop the police or intel people from reading encrypted email, but it does slow them down. Zfone, however, uses stronger encryption. This means more delays, perhaps fatal delays, in finding out what the bad guys are saying. There's no immediate solution for this problem, unless Phil Zimmermann has provided a back door in Zfone for the intel folks. That is unlikely, but at least possible.
"I'm confused, you seem to have not read the entirety of the very sentence you quote. Here, I'll highlight it: "Zfone, however, uses stronger encryption". "
No i read that part...it's stronger than something that causes delays. I'm still missing the part that makes decryption impossible. Perhaps you have other information you aren't sharing?
"Further, this has nothing to do with a warrant, clearly you don't understand encryption if you think a warrant will help."
And you apparently understand warrants. Wiretaps will still be more than possible. ZFone makes it harder (not impossible, or at least until you show me the article you are referencing) for someone without the proper authorization to access the communications
It's quite a bit easier to quash the dissidents, since those technologies would likely be forbidden in their countries, for whatever purpose, whereas here, the mere use of such a technology in an of itself doesn't constitute criminal behavior. So where it might help dissidents in oppressive regimes, it won't, and where it might help terrorists threaten democracies, it will, and really with very little positive in return for the vast majority of people whose calls are so mundane as to not be worth the extra processor cycles to apply Rijndael to their VoIP packets.
Zimmerman is a terrorist enabler.
ANY encryption scheme that is used more than once can be broken (though not necessarily easily).
Good point, may need this in Europe soon.
Also, warrants have been obtained by the FBI to install keystroke loggers and memory scanners, etc.
You know, I thought about that when i read it too, and I left it alone, since it's a fairly technical discussion. I have to wonder just how big of a key is a mere 'impediment' rather than an impossibility...
/me leaves the whole topic alone...
Yeah, but those are 'side channel attacks,' and you have to have probable cause to get the warrant to put a keylogger or bug the room in the first place, and the mere use of encryption sure won't get that through FISC.
I thought a PGP key length of 4096 was pretty much unbreakable.
I don't knoow either!
"No i read that part...it's stronger than something that causes delays. I'm still missing the part that makes decryption impossible. Perhaps you have other information you aren't sharing?"Nothing secret on my end, it's fairly well known that asymmetric or 'public key' encryption, with fairly large keys, a strong algorithm (esp. that provides a large key space) is pretty much unbreakable within a (or several thousand even) human lifetime with current processing power. Unless a significant breakthrough in factoring extremely large prime numbers (and I have no reason to believe an intelligence agency has done so and kept it to themselves), these back of the envelope calculations will remain true.
By that standard, so is Boeing. ;)
I'd need a warrant to park a van outside your house and listen to the spread spectrum cordless traffic, and I can't get that just because you're encrypting your calls.
I would guess the scenarios I outlined in #31 might not even require a warrant. Correct me if wrong.
But as for as this helping terrorists; hey Hollywood is going to encrypt everything right up to the point where your eyeball sees those phosphors or transisters lighting up.
So, just think of this as an American citizens very own DRM. :-)
VOIP calls can go directly from computer to computer with no contact with to the phone grid. The call is encrypted on each end and the data going over the net is encrypted at all times.
There is no way to conventially tap a VOIP call that never touches the phone system. Warrant or no, it would have to be intercepted and decrypted.
But like I said earlier, watch for vulnerabilities on either end prior to encryption.
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