Jack Straw on the 'Today' programme

[Roger Bisson]

--- Alison W <alison@alisonwheeler.com> wrote:
> Matthew Pemble replied to Roger Bisson:
> >This doesn't work unless you also block all
> international data calls.  I
> >once ran a site where all international data
> traffic passed through a
> >(foreign) government owned firewall and this was
> not acceptable.
> 
> Surely, you'd actually have top ban _all_
> international calls. Just because
> something is stated as 'data' or 'voice' doesn't
> stop the other going
> through, indeed it wouldn't be too difficult to steg
> a datastream in the
> background 'noise' of a voice call.
> and why stop at international call? Next would be
> call to/from N.Ireland?
> to/from the Basque or Catalan areas?
> 

These are interesting points that you (and Matthew)
have made here - ones that I had not considered.

However, reference steg on voice/data .. is lossy
compression of the sort used by telephone operators
likely to preserve watermarked data?

I suspect low bandwidth covert data might get through,
but high bandwidth data surely would get lost along
the way.

Also, perhaps some form of 'jammer' might be used to
override watermarked data on international lines.

Ref: international data / voice calls, someone once
said to me that that all international telephone lines
entering and leaving Britain are "listened to".

Personally, I am not sure about this but compared to
the number of domestic lines, the number of
international telephone lines that exist and are in
operation at any given time must be relatively small,
so perhaps this is not inconceivable -- particularly
in the case communication with states such as
Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran etc.

So, unless you are prepared to break your data up into
pieces and send them all through different mediums to
create a jigsaw puzzle, I suspect that comms over both
analogue and digital international lines could be
compromised quite easily and, perhaps made unreliable,
where "unapproved" content is detected.

Also, convergence over time of telephone and data
communications and voice/video conferencing protocols
may contribute to the ability for governments to
identify anomolous comms which -- as with the
transmission of raw PGP encryption now -- could lead
the security services to ask questions sooner rather
than later.

Roger



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