The Smart Convergence Blog reports the Justice Department and the FBI are asking regulators for expanded technical capabilities to intercept Voice Over IP communications… and anything else that uses broadband.
Jeffrey Pulver’s Free World Dialup enables members to make no-cost telephone calls between each other. But the FBI and Justice Department are worried that Voice Over IP (VoIP) applications may become safe havens for criminals to communicate with one another, unless U.S. regulators make broadband services more vulnerable to lawful electronic eavesdropping, according to comments filed with the FCC this month.
The government filing was prompted by the efforts of telecom entrepreneur Jeffrey Pulver to win a ruling that his growing peer-to-peer Internet telephony service Free World Dialup is not subject to the regulations that govern telephone companies.
Free World Dialup has been called “Napster for Phones.” It’s a free service aimed at developing Internet telephony as a mainstream alternative to the public switched telephone network. A Cisco SIP telephone ($250), plugs directly into an IP network. Once you register your FWD phone with the FWD Network, you are able to contact all of the other registered FWD members if they are on-line when you are. Users can “dial” each other over the Internet anywhere in the world at no cost.
Free World Dialup provides a directory service that assigns each user a virtual telephone number, and sets up each phone call. Since it was launched in November, the service has gathered over 12,000 users.
Jeff Pulver, CEO, Pulver.com, wants “to get it on the record for once and for all that Internet telephony over broadband, where the calls never touch the legacy telephony network, should not be regulated“.
Voice over Wi-Fi networks may become increasingly popular and more VoIP Pocket PC software is coming.
PocketPCs running Telesym for wireless VoIP uses the SIP standard, favored by Microsoft. Pocket Presence and their new VoIP Pro is optimized for 802.11b networks, and uses Soundware from Global IP Sound for superior sound quality. PocketPCs, of course, can also view news on Yahoo, check hotmail and the weather or message.
The LAPD will use 1,500 rugged Symbol Pocket PCs for cars, motorcycles and foot-patrol officers.
Mobile VoIP phones by Symbol and Spectralink are smaller and more cell-like but have traditionally used the H.323 compatible standard, now becoming less fashionable than the Microsoft-endorsed SIP standard. The SIP Center has the latest news.
VoIP is alien to cellular and land-line operators. Vivato’s Wi-Fi Switch could change everything…but the batteries.
The Spring 2003 VON Trade Show & Expo is being held March 31st-April 3rd at the San Jose Convention Center.
And - lest we forget - this word via Boing Boing and John Gilmore:
“The spy agencies didn’t predict the end of the Cold War, didn’t predict 9/11, didn’t predict the information revolution, are drowning in way too much data with little understanding, and resisted the spread of the encryption that barely protects our infrastructures today.Meanwhile the President and his gang are destroying freedom at home, wasting vast resources on third rate tinpot dictators, destabilizing international law and long-standing peaceful alliances, and supporting criminality and corruption and terrorism all over the world with price supports on illegal drugs.
This government hasn’t learned that if you’re watching everybody, you’re watching nobody. Our society was much safer when it was run by people who knew that if you spend 99% of your time investigating innocent citizens who you have no reason to suspect, you’re going to have real trouble catching the people you have actual reasons to suspect. Either these guys are stupid, or they really are trying to build a police state”.
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