On Mon, 21 Jun 2004, John Curran wrote:
With respect to enforcement, I am sure there are ways to prevent being caught involving amusing offshore logistics, but that will still prevent the vast majority of US businesses from offering non-2281 compliant services.
Off-shore would be the NSA, not the FBI. The NSA has not reported any problems tapping VOIP communications. But the NSA's budget is a lot bigger than the FBI's :-) There are lots of examples of extraterritoriality. MasterCard built a data center in Europe to process European credit card transactions. The US Department of Transportation restricts the use of Canadian train dispatchers controlling portions of US railroad tracks. All the telephone switches serving Palestinian Territory are physically located in Israel. Several third-world countries have been trying to block the use of international VOIP. There aren't that many international networks, with appropriate pressure, they could block/tap/whatever people trying to use extraterritorial VOIP.
I'm not advocating the DoJ's position on this matter, just trying to clarify it for the list (since it was rather muddled in earlier postings).
The Department of Justice has been successfully tapping computer networks since at least 1995. http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/1996/March96/146.txt FEDERAL CYBERSLEUTHERS ARMED WITH FIRST EVER COMPUTER WIRERTAP ORDER NET INTERNATIONAL HACKER CHARGED WITH ILLEGALLY ENTERING HARVARD AND U.S MILITARY COMPUTERS WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The first use of a court-ordered wiretap on a computer network led today to charges against an Argentine man accused of breaking into Harvard University's computers which he used as a staging point to crack into numerous computer sites including several belonging to the Department of Defense and NASA. The wiretap, on the computer of Harvard's Faculty of Arts and Sciences during the last two months of 1995, resulted in the filing of a criminal complaint against 21-year-old Julio Cesar Ardita of Buenos Aires. An arrest warrant has been issued for Ardita. It is not a technical problem (maybe 5% technical, 95% non-technical). I don't disagree LEA may have a problem. However, almost all of the "problems" identified have been with either money, training for law enforcement, or non-IP technologies (i.e. push-to-talk on Nextel, which doesn't require a connection to the PSTN).