NZ Police Pay Vodafone for Interception Capability

Repton writes "The New Zealand government is to give the Police NZ$1.1m, to pay Vodafone to modify their mobile network so the police can intercept calls. Previously, they had complained that, because Vodafone encrypts calls, preventing the cops from combatting "organised crime". Telecom (the other mobile network in NZ) has already made similar changes."

SO tap it after it gets decrypted

[Anonymous Coward]

Its encrypted on the airwaves, but not in the wires. tap the other end og the line, or the middle

I see a new business model in action

[funkman]

Of course ... could this work for the bad guys too?

Re:De-centralize the encryption.

[ericlondaits]

Plus, if Vodafone can break the encryption, it wasn't really encrypted in the first place.
I mean, to give the customers a real sense of security, there shouldn't be any "copies" of the encryption keys except the ones on the phones. Else, in the end, you're trusting the encryption on a system administrator and a handful of technicians.

Turing machine is the only answer

[Weezul]

Law enforcment is not likely to get the old style phone network or the networks which connect to them (cell) to use any real encryption. We need to find a way to circumvent the control that law enforcment has over the production of phones, i.e. we need user control over phones (ala open source). I see two current ways to do this:

1) We have only source phone software for PC-toPC phones, but we need to make shure that it "wins" the PC-to-PC phone market.

2) We need to see an "all software" PDA/phone which adds support for faxes and voice recording/play back by user replacable software software (i.e. a win modem and sound card). This would make it easy to add the PGP phone protocoll to the PDA/phone. Unfortunatly, the only thing that I think we can do to really help this in the short term would be to make shure that Linux maintains support with the popular win modem chipsets and maybe write PGP/phone software for these chipsets.

Re:What does this have to do with encryption?

[nlvp]

Yep - seems to me that, blinded by technology, the NZ government has accepted a non-argument from Vodafone to pay them a fortune in return for developing a capability they already had.

Fantastic!

Re:SO tap it after it gets decrypted

[Friendly]

Umm the whole point of cell phones is that they can be any where. How do you know which route the call is going to make through the telcos system. With this system they can also ease drop on all calls without detection. They only need to recieve the signal and viola they can listen to your phone sex conversations on you cell.

What does this have to do with encryption?

[Spamboi]

As far as I can see, the encryption issue is just a red herring. Sure, the calls are encrypted on the air, but that's just to prevent casual eavesdropping with a radio receiver.

Vodaphone HAS to be able to decrypt the calls, since the calls may ultimately go out on the POTS network. The issue doesn't seem to be that the wireless network is encrypted, but that there isn't infrastructure in place in the wired base stations of the network for call interception.

Andy

Re:What does this have to do with encryption?

[jmu1]

What really happened...
"The Man" : Aaah, how do I get dis ting ta werk?
"Vodafone" : Give us your taxpayers money, and we shall give you what seems like a technological breakthrough, yet has been as easy as using parts you can buy in a local electronics store... Oops, scratch that last part.

De-centralize the encryption.

[billcopc]

If the telco is forced to ditch the encryption, or just give the police the decryption keys, then someone will just have to come up with a phone mod that encrypts on its own, and that requires the receiver to have the same crypt chip in order to communicate. If their target is organised crime then this would be trivial for them to implement. They already have good electronics people on their side and encryption info can be found all over the place. For every crack, there is a counter-crack.