Several high-tech companies and privacy advocates want the Internet Engineering Task Force to give up any plans allowing wiretaps of cyber-telephone calls.
APBNews.com reports the companies and advocates sent the IETF a letter Monday which says proposals to include cyber-eavesdropping would hurt network security, cause more illegal activities, cut user privacy, choke innovation, and place significant costs on communications developers.
The group includes the Free Congress Foundation, the Federation of American Scientists, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and others.
The American Civil Liberties Union has sent its own letter of concern to the IETF. The ACLU fears law enforcement is asking the IETF to do "the equivalent of requiring the home building industry to place a 'secret' door in all new homes to which only it would have the key," as ACLU associate director Barry Steinhardt writes. He continues that it would "open up a Pandora's box to an ever-increasing demand for services from law enforcement, and you will be consigning (Internet) service providers to a future of unknown, but undoubtedly significant, costs."
The anxious also include Georgia Republican Congressman Robert Barr, who writes the IETF that Internet telephony "falls far short of the statutory definitions" of the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act. "Furthermore, based on Congress's intent to do nothing more than maintain the status quo by enacting CALEA," Barr continues, "it is questionable whether Internet telephony could ever be appropriately included under the act's mandates."
Right now, the IETF is considering plans to improve how data is transmitted online.A working group within the task force is mulling protocols for Internet telephony, APBNews says, where computer users make phone calls over the Net - a technology now in its early infancy.
One new such protocol, Ipv6, would replace the current Ipv4, writes APBNews's David Noack, allowing for expanded Internet addresses now being swallowed by the growing Net. The current numbering code cannot keep pace with the expansion of IP addresses, and a shortage will develop at some point, Noack observes.
But privacy watchdogs fear the IETF will try to accommodate such as the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, from 1994. That law was passed to help protect public safety and national security and clear up solutions the telecommunications industry needs to help law enforcement with legal surveillance, but privacy advocates fear avenues being opened within it to impinge upon general privacy rights.
And the companies and advocates also fear crime won't be cut by way of new eavesdropping because criminal enterprises are already subject to proper law enforcement surveillance anyway and would likely encrypt their messages in any case.
Interestingly, the FBI says it isn't pushing for a back door to cyber-eavesdropping. Spokesman Barry Smith tells APBNews federal wiretap law would apply if conducting even cyber-surveillance.
