VOIP or just talki'n

Authorities are requiring that telephony operators provides them with the possibility to wire-tap phone lines. Before VoIP this was a necessity since the police had to patch in to the copper to do the bugging, but this is not the case with VoIP, there is no copper wire that you have to put a crocodile clamp on anymore. Today everything that passes through the wires are just ones and zeros. VoIP is just an application run over IP just as any other application such as, messaging client's, email or games.

Thieves planning a robbery don't have to use the phone to discuss the job, they could as well be planning the operation over a messenger client or while playing a session of Unreal Tournament or with their Skype client.

If I would guess I would think that in most surveillance cases both data traffic and PSTN and mobile traffic are monitored for a suspect. But if the suspect has VoIP instead of a PSTN connection then even the phone communication is available in the data stream delivered to the police.

In the old days when there was just one public telephony operator the authorities could set the demands on fancy automated system for surveillance. Today when voip operators are growing up like mushrooms it must be a hustle for them to make sure every operator follows the requirements on delivering of the information. To make this easier for themselves the authorities have put together a bunch of standards that they ask every operator big or small to implement. This means that even really small start-ups have to invest in advanced and very expensive equipment just so that the police can sit nicely with their hot cup of coffee eating their donut and surfing the web while listening in on their suspects. How much should a small operator invest in large systems just to make it convenient for the police.

Operators need to take their responsibility and deliver the information but is it really up the the operator to analyze the data? The operator should deliver the data stream for the customers port, and should not look in to what applications the customer are using, mail, chat, voice over IP, or games. That should be up to the authorities to invest in systems that analyze the data and creates, audio files, mails web pages etc.

If the police would invest in a nice system like this, they can themselves decide what data they need to analyze and do not have to push these requirement towards the operators and we could still put a stop to criminals.