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.
[sarcasm]I feel so much safer now.[/sarcasm]
Just you wait till they start using telepathy. No trail whatsoever.
What do you mean "wait until"? You obviously have no idea of what The Rove is capable of.
BUMP!
By "them" I meant the bad guys, not Karl.
Ah, very well then. Carry on.
But phone reveille is still acceptable, right?
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".
Thus, while PGP might have slowed them down, Zfone's encryption makes it 'impossible.'
Further, this has nothing to do with a warrant, clearly you don't understand encryption if you think a warrant will help.
RV bump....
hehehehh
(somehow I KNEW you were gonna write that)
That was an absolutely horrible joke. May I have another? ;P
Not much of a story really. It is going to happen eventually. Point to point encryption for all types of communication is going to become normal.
I'm all for it. Sure, it gives some tools to the enemy who will probably be early adopters, but the very act of using such encryption should single them out from all the clear traffic. As for the information gathering tools we'd lose, new ones will arise. We can't freeze the enemy to using certain tools, and we can't limit ourselves eithers. With the breaking of the story of the wire tapping, the terrorists gained valuable intelligence on how we were disrupting their operations. They're already adapting, and now we have to find and adapt to them.
Information doesn't exist in a vacuum. If the terrorists are passing information through digital means, somewhere that information is unencrypted. Given that encrypted traffic can be sniffed for, tracked, rerouted - the terrorists may just discover that encrypted communications can reveal their agents, expose their agents, or may just be unreliable.
Oh, maybe not yet... But give our people time to work on the problem. I'm sure they'll figure out a way to accomplish the mission. It is a bastard of an inconvenience, but it was bound to happen.
It also gives tools to dissidents in Iran, N. Korea, China and Saudi Arabia.
No. :)
"I love when the 'privacy' lobby puts self-interest so far in front of common sense that they can't see beyond their smug self-satisfaction."
The right of Americans to be left alone by the government unless they are doing something illegal is fundamental to the American way of life.
Public key PGP encryption can be broken?
The only thing I could figure out was he meant a warrant to plant a bug (listening device).
LOL!!!
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