Govt may soon find BlackBerry solution

KOLKATA/NEW DELHI: The government may soon find a solution to the BlackBerry security issue. San Jose-based Cain Technologies and SS8 Networks will be demonstrating their interception equipment to the Department of Telecom (DoT) and Intelligence Bureau (IB) from Friday.

DoT sources said if the demonstrations are successful, the government will direct Canada’s RIM (the maker of BlackBerry smartphones) to install the interception solution on Indian mobile networks expeditiously.

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Who’s Listening To Your Calls?

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How To Make Your Phone Untappable

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So unencrypted VoIP is less secure than traditional telephony?

Vastly less secure. The traditional public telephone system that we’ve been using for the last hundred years is fairly well protected. It’s easy for the government to wiretap it by going to the phone company, but not easy for anyone else to wiretap it. If anyone else wanted to wiretap someone’s conversations, they’d have to find a place close to his or her office, get some alligator clips, and try to find the right wire out of thousands to clip them onto, and hope that nobody spots you doing it.

With VoIP, it’s not nearly so hard. All you just need is to take over a computer on the same network as the VoIP traffic with some spyware. That computer intercepts the VoIP conversations and stores them on a hard disk as .wav files that can be browsed later. A wiretapper could even choose to target the phone calls of a company’s general counsel talking to an outside law firm, or the CEO talking to his counterpart at another company.

It’s much easier because you don’t have to physically be there. You can be in China or Russia and target a company without obtaining a visa or entering the country you’re trying to infiltrate.

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Wiretapping’s Fuzzy Future

The Internet has never cared much for legal boundaries. Phishers steal credit cards across oceans and off-shore sites offer gambling with little regard for the laws of the countries where their victims or customers are located.

But when it comes to the government’s search for foreign terrorists, says Eric Lichtblau, Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter and the author of the federal wiretapping exposé, Bush’s Law, that internationalism could get especially hairy.

One of the major sticking points in the U.S. Congress’ debate over changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act has been the question of calls between Americans and foreigners. The National Security Agency (NSA) isn’t authorized to tap Americans’ conversations without a warrant–but the Internet, and specifically voice over Internet protocol, or VoIP, doesn’t draw as clear a line to the location of a caller or a call’s recipient as the traditional phone system does.

As VoIP’s low cost and flexibility convinces more and more organizations to adopt the technology, the line demarcating the NSA’s ability to snoop on phone calls will only get blurrier, Lichtblau argues. Forbes.com spoke with Lichtblau about the Internet’s fuzzy geography, the government agencies’ push to keep up with new communication technologies, and whether it’s possible to hide your secrets from the feds with encryption.

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