New Spy Tools From Cisco--For Good Or Evil?

from the depends-on-how-you-look-at-it dept

Declan McCullough is talking with someone from Cisco who worked on their new "lawful interception" capability that would let authorities easily eavesdrop on communications that go over Cisco equipment. McCullough points out that some of the technology can limit the excess info that authorities get when doing surveillance - but it also makes it easy for surveillance to occur with no audit trail whatsoever making sure that the surveillance is following the law. When he asks the Cisco guy about that idea, the response is that such an audit trail probably wouldn't be possible with the current technology - which isn't really the question being asked. The question is why they didn't bother to put such technology into the technology.

1 Comments | Leave a Comment..


If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...
 

Reader Comments (rss)

(Flattened / Threaded)

  1.  

    what a lovely thought...

    identicon
    Anonymous Coward, Apr 21st, 2003 @ 11:02pm

    ...in-band, automatic interception.

    Did the Feds even consider why the originial engineers left this sort of feature out? You do know that cisco use to pride themselves on this fact, don't you.

    The Japapnese tried *exactly* this sort of thing with their Cell phones. Within a week recordings surfaced of politicians conversing with police officials (just politicians of another sort). It was all quite embarassing.

    reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


Add Your Comment

Have a Techdirt Account? Sign in now. Want one? Register here
Get Techdirt’s Daily Email
Save me a cookie
  • Note: A CRLF will be replaced by a break tag (<br>), all other allowable HTML will remain intact
  • Allowed HTML Tags: <b> <i> <a> <em> <br> <strong> <blockquote> <hr> <tt>


A word from our Sponsors...
Follow Techdirt
Flattr rss rss
From the Techdirt Archive...
A word from our Sponsors...

Close

Email This