The Telecoms.com Podcast: US tech giants, Apple, public cloud

Michael Ferris 20/10/2020 @ 11:19 am

Great to see the podcast back. Interesting piece on encryption and eavesdropping. I was surprised you didn’t mention lawful interception (LI) as a capability for law enforcers to tackle crime, when you were saying “how was this done in the past?” It’s been a European Council Resolution since 1995 and it’s done in the core network, not in the handset. It’s not a catch-all, of course, and has led to the increasing popularity of VoIP based communications, particularly through gaming apps, for organised crime to avoid intercept. LI is used to intercept data connections as well as voice, but of course it can’t decode E2E encrypted data. The Snowden revelations led to platform owners tightening up security and, in the process, creating yet more avenues for covert comms, hence the latest government intervention on Facebook’s plans. There’s no easy answer to this one, as Joe Public wants privacy assurances which can only be provided by means which also aid organised crime.

2 comments

Michael Ferris 20/10/2020 @ 11:19 am


Great to see the podcast back. Interesting piece on encryption and eavesdropping. I was surprised you didn’t mention lawful interception (LI) as a capability for law enforcers to tackle crime, when you were saying “how was this done in the past?” It’s been a European Council Resolution since 1995 and it’s done in the core network, not in the handset. It’s not a catch-all, of course, and has led to the increasing popularity of VoIP based communications, particularly through gaming apps, for organised crime to avoid intercept. LI is used to intercept data connections as well as voice, but of course it can’t decode E2E encrypted data. The Snowden revelations led to platform owners tightening up security and, in the process, creating yet more avenues for covert comms, hence the latest government intervention on Facebook’s plans. There’s no easy answer to this one, as Joe Public wants privacy assurances which can only be provided by means which also aid organised crime.
- Scott Bicheno 20/10/2020 @ 12:36 pm
  
  
  Good point. I touched on it when referring to signals intelligence and it seems to be prevention of that sort of thing by end-to-end encryption that is upsetting government agencies.