gnu@toad.com (06/23/91)
In a posting to the TELECOM Digest the other day, I noticed a surprising similarity between the current state of the East German telephone system, and the proposal put forth by the FBI for the United States telephone system: Richard Budd <rcbudd@rhqvm19.vnet.ibm.com> wrote: > There are two difficulties holding up the unification of post > office and telephone coding. > First is the state of the eastern German telephone system. It is > going to take several years and hundreds of millions of deutsch marks > to bring a telephone system with no major improvements since the 1950's > up to western German telecom standards. There is also the fact that > the East German telephone system was designed to allow the Stasi (the > secret police) easy access to conversations from any East German lucky > enough to have recived permission from the government to have a phone. Contrast this with: > It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications > services and manufacturers of electronic communications service equipment > shall ensure that communications systems permit the government to obtain > the plain text of contents of voice, data, and other communications > when appropriately authorized by law. The particular reason that the FBI pushed (and is STILL PUSHING) to get this language enacted by Congress is because communications providers have been unwilling to modify their equipment to make it easy and cheap to do wiretaps. Or, as the FBI put it in a press release on April 26th that Martin Hellman dug out: "The proposed sense-of-Congress statement seeks to place on the telecommunications industry a sense of duty to design its new digital telecommunications systems so that law enforcement continues to receive ... communications ...." The text I left out in the " ... " was: "only those communications specifically authorized by court order." Note how their statement cleverly places the emphasis on "only court ordered" though the real purpose is to change the design of digital communications systems to make interception easier. A communications system design can't tell whether an interception is court-ordered or not; it can only be designed to make it easier or harder to intercept. Current systems are not particularly designed with ease or lack of ease of interception in mind. An excellent example is cellular phones. It's trivial to intercept cellular calls at random over the air, but a court-ordered interception of a single cellular phone must physically tap all the cells, because calls from that phone could go through many single physical places -- there is no central point common to all the calls, except the portable phone itself. The FBI *wants* phone system designers to start thinking about interception -- in particular, they want interception to be easier. Just like the East German secret police. John Gilmore {sun,uunet,pyramid}!hoptoad!gnu gnu@toad.com gnu@cygnus.com