VoIP tapping research funded by Feds works on Skype
The federal government is funding the development of a prototype surveillance tool by George Mason University researchers who have discovered a novel way to trace Internet phone conversations.
Their project is designed to let police identify whether suspects under surveillance have been communicating through voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)--information that would be unavailable today if people choose to communicate surreptitiously. The eavesdropping technique already has been shown to work with Skype, the researchers say.
"From a privacy advocate's point of view, this is an attack on privacy," Xinyuan Wang, an assistant professor of software engineering and principal investigator, said Tuesday. "From a police point of view, this is a way to trace things."
To translate his research into a tool that could be used by police in a successor version of the FBI's Carnivore system, Wang received a grant of $307,436 from the National Science Foundation this month. The grant calls for the development of a prototype VoIP-tracing application to provide a "critical but currently missing capability in the fight on crime and terrorism."
The NSF grant comes as federal police are fretting about criminals using VoIP to mask their communications. The Federal Communications Commission on Friday approved mandatory wiretapping requirements for some VoIP providers, and the FBI has been warning for more than two years that VoIP may become a "haven for criminals, terrorists and spies."
