VoIP Technology Defeats Lawful Intercept, Say Cops

Sky News today reports that 'Cops Cannot Tap Net Calls', pointing out that Skype allows encrypted peer-to-peer calls across the Internet that are hard to track and basically impossible to decrypt.

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According to experts who have spoken to Sky News, an agent may be able to see that a VOIP conversation is happening, but not who is speaking, where they are or what they are saying.

Peer-to-peer services like Skype are likely to be a pain for governments everywhere, but this does not mean that VoIP in general is completely beyond the scope of regulation. For example, in the UK any VoIP service that touches the PSTN still has to comply with all the necessary regulations on intercept.

James Tagg, CEO of mobile VoIP telco Truphone said this:

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"There are engineers at Truphone with experience of working with Government security agencies, and we are 100% aware of the legal requirements and of our responsibilities. As a result, and unlike some VoIP services, Truphone provides for lawful intercept and also requires validation of identity before usage.”

So VoIP is not in itself the problem, and in fact there has seen a lot of criticism in the past of the security aspects of pre-pay phones. With pre-pay, it is possible to anonymously buy a phone (or SIM card), use it for a while, and then discard it and buy another. Here the possibility of call tapping exists, according to government requirements, but of course it requires more work from the security services in order to find the identity of the handset's user.

Another key problem for the security services is that there are many forms of communication these days, not just telephony but also instant messaging and email, which can equally be encrypted and bypass the lawful intercept regime if required by terrorists and criminals.

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