At 06:14 PM 3/13/96 -0800, Tim wrote:
One reason Washington pushed for the Wiretap Act (aka Digital Telephony) was because digital switches have made conventional methods of wiretapping and pen registers harder and harder to do. (I'm not a phone phreaker expert, as some of you no doubt are, so I don't know the details of how wiretaps were done prior to the advent of digital switches...I picture wires connected to the back of PBX systems, and I presume the ESS systems and their ilk changed this dramatically.)
There are different places you can do your wiretap, depending on convenience, weather, observability, whether you've got a warrant, etc. ESSs don't really change the pair of wire coming from your house out to the telephone pole, over to your local wire center, and into the distribution system that eventually connects them to the switch. You've still got a pair of copper wires. On the other hand, underground wiring is harder to get at, and pair gain systems such as Subscriber Loop Carrier bring some of the multiplexing out to your block instead of all the way back to the phone office, and ESSs do make those more cost-effective. Connections from PBXs are also harder to tap than individual phone lines, since your phone call may be on any of the (probably virtual) circuits going from the PBX to the phone office.
The main way they blew it is that the Wiretap Act ostensibly does not cover end-to-end encryption, especially as computers are used in place of telephones.
I don't think they blew it there, although the EFF's work against S.266 a few years back really hurt them. There are two ways to get oppressive laws enacted - wholesale, or bit by bit. A wholesale ban would have affected a lot of people, and had substantial constitutional difficulties. On the other hand, a mere regulation telling the already regulated telephone companies that they have to do a bit more free work in return for their monopoly status isn't a big constitutional stretch, and mainly annoys phone companies rather than end consumers. Also, it's far easier to enforce regulations on phone companies - there are bureaucrats in place to do it, you can kick them around in all sorts of ways if they don't cooperate, and it gets you most of your wiretapping and enforcement done wholesale rather than retail. (It's still major slime, of course :-) #-- # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, stewarts@ix.netcom.com, +1-415-442-2215 pager 408-787-1281 # "At year's end, however, new government limits on Internet access threatened # to halt the growth of Internet use. [...] Government control of news media # generally continues to depend on self-censorship to regulate political and # social content, but the authorities also consistently penalize those who # exceed the permissable." - US government statement on China...