Italian version
.hacktivism
20.05.03 Free World Dialup, phone calls free from control.
A new VoIP (Voice over IP) service is catching the attention of phone companies, but also of FBI and the american Department of Justice, who demand new laws to extend their power of control and interception on Internet voice communication. The excuse is that this kind of applications could become a free zone for criminal actions, and this request is made more urgent by the success of Jeffrey Pulver's idea, whose peer-to-peer telecommunication service 'Free World Dialup', already called 'Telephone Napster' is a worthy alternative to phone bills: after an initial investment of about 250 dollars for buying a Cisco SIP phone - a device which works like a normal analog phone, but connected to the Internet - the users can call each other in the whole world at zero cost. After a few months, more than twelve thousand people have already joined this initiative, which gives each user a white pages service and a virtual number the calls are based on. Now, what's being demanded is that this kind of service, too, should be subjected to the federal law known as CALEA, which, since 1994, forces every telecommunication service provider to make possible for the FBI to intercept every communication passing on their networks. It's a futile move, since this system - the security experts say - would be easily circumventable, as well as dangerous: the extension of CALEA to modem, DSL and broadband services would force the companies to substantially modify their networks, with the unstated intention to greatly simplify the act of interception, without distinction between voice and data.
Ilaria Roncaglia