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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.

"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.

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.

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...

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.

That was an absolutely horrible joke. May I have another? ;P

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.

I read that today in FYEOExpress. First, the reportage on the *legal* NSA wiretapping inspires terrorists to use harder to track pre-paid phones, now VoIP calls (which they use a *lot*) will be encrypted, for free! 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. Yes, keep our agencies from listening to our calls!

[sarcasm]I feel so much safer now.[/sarcasm]