VoIP Befuddles Lawful Intercept

VoIP is ready to cause another set of legal headaches when it comes to lawful intercept, says Eric Litchblau, New York Times reporter and author of a book on federal wiretapping. The NSA can't tap Americans' conversations without a warrant, but VoIP doesn't give clear distinctions on the location of either a caller or a call recipient, unlike POTS.

If you can't determine the physical location of a caller, does that make the call fair game for intercept? Nobody really knows where the NSA has drawn the lines because government electronic surveillance work is classified, but after 9/11, the agency may err on the side of caution and more data collected.

Surprisingly, Litchblau doesn't think much of publicly available encryption and efforts such as the Zfone solution as a showstopper for government wiretapping. He suggests more money has been funneled into the intelligence community to close a supposed technology gap, but there hasn't been a widespread outcry by Congress and government agencies to place limits on encryption.

For more:
- Litchblau's interview on government wiretapping by Forbes

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