They were talking about
iPhones on the radio on my way to work today. Apparently hackers have written
software to unlock them. Steve Jobs says, "We have to stay one step ahead
of the hackers."
Is this ever going to
change?
Years ago police
surveillance involved wiretaps, which were literally that; a set of clips on
the cable pair and you could listen to the conversation.
In the late 80's local
telephone companies started to offer ISDN. This was a big deal because it
enabled simultaneous transmission of voice and data over the same telephone
cable pair. It wasn't very successful, however, a very interesting niche market
developed for ISDN: Organized Crime. Folks like the 'Teflon Don' and the
'Winter Hill Gang' loved this service. If one taps onto an ISDN cable pair, the
tap renders only buzzing. Law enforcement could not eavesdrop on ISDN lines!
In an effort to find a
solution to the surveillance crisis, the FBI approached Bellcore for some
technical guidance to better understand ISDN and my group at Bellcore developed
an overview course and we trained 365 agents on ISDN fundamentals.
So began CALEA. By 1994
Congress had written it into law. Telephone companies needed to provide means
for judicial surveillance. A box was developed which enabled surveillance of
digital lines from within the central office.
Now there's a new
challenge: Voice Over IP.
As with ISDN,
challenges arise from Voice over IP, but VOIP brings problems nearly impossible
to solve in the industry's current state. An IP telephone can be moved from one
location to another without the knowledge of the service
provider. Data on a network is easy to encrypt and much of the voice traffic in
processed in tunnels. So how do you break into the tunnel and then decrypt the
data? And of course voice traffic is transmitted simultaneously with data and
video on the same facilities. That's the power of IP networks, but it's also a
complicating factor. Will CALEA challenge the current state of the internet?
Will it alter the opportunities on your horizon?
If we use
history as a guide, we can predict that this challenge will become more acute
before it goes away. Does your team understand the fundamental concepts behind
VOIP? As consumers, law enforcement agencies, hackers and competitors all
scramble to master these emerging applications of technology, who will emerge
as the expert and who will lead the industry into the future?
And, like Steve Jobs at
Apple, we need to keep "one step ahead."
