The Hindu Business Line : Law listens in

With VoIP becoming popular, it is only a question of time before our intelligence agencies cast their net wider to snoop on what all is going through such a channel.

The June 9 ruling on cyber space regulation by a Federal Court of Appeals should strengthen the US Government's hands in its fight against terrorism and other anti-social activities.

The Court ruled that companies that provide telecommunication services over the Internet must permit enforcement officials to listen in to calls. Of course, such surveillance cannot be random and arbitrary. In every case, it will have to be backed by a judicial order.

This latest decision, in effect, upheld the Federal Communications Commission's stand that Web-based phone service was no different from the conventional phone system governed by the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA).

Interestingly, one of the three judges dissented from the majority view and said the scope of CALEA did not extend to "information services". We in India will have to wait for a judicial verdict on this point.

With VoIP becoming popular, it is only a question of time before our intelligence agencies cast their net wider — if they have not already done so — to snoop on what all is going through such a channel. Terrorist use of this medium cannot be ruled out, once they get the feeling that VoIP regulations are lax.

It was just in my last column that I referred to the Jordan-born Al Qaeda leader Zarqawi's fascination for cyber space. Following his death earlier this month, during a US bomb attack on his hide-out near Baghdad, it will be interesting to watch how his successor is going to view propaganda through the Net. Zarqawi's followers have already posted several messages threatening retaliation for the killing of their leader.

Against this backdrop comes the news that around 2003, Al Qaeda had come close to a poison gas attack on the New York subway system, but Osama Bin Laden's deputy, Ayman Zawahiri, called it off six weeks before zero hour. This startling information is revealed in a book The One Percent Doctrine by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ron Suskind slated for release very shortly. Significantly, the tip-off about the projected attack came from a computer seized from a Bahraini jihadist arrested in Saudi Arabia.

While putting down such information in a laptop and allowing it to be captured by law enforcement authorities is not the smartest thing to do, this happening indicates that we cannot look for terrorist-related data in conventional places, and that we must monitor purchase by suspect groups and individuals of all devices that can store information.

After killing Zarqawi, the US and Iraqi armed forces seized from the place where he was hiding a few computer hard drives and digital cameras. One interesting speculation, not necessarily fanciful, is that Zarqawi had used thumb drives to store his data!

Controversy in US

While on the subject of the Defence Services, there is a controversy in the US over the loss, on May 3, 2006, of voluminous data pertaining to military personnel from the house of an analyst working for the Department of Veteran Affairs. Of the 2.2 million personnel to whom the data related, 80 per cent are on active duty. The electronic file in question contained birth dates and social security numbers and it was stored in a laptop that was stolen from the official's home.

While there is no suspicion yet that the data had been misused, the incident highlights the need for physically securing every laptop, especially when it contains sensitive official information. Many owners leave laptops behind in cars while they are at shopping malls and similar public facilities. There cannot be a more attractive invitation to prowlers looking, not merely for critical government data, but for expensive hardware that finds a ready market in most parts of the world.

As if in response to the incident at the Department of Veteran Affairs, the US House Judiciary Chairman, James Sensenbrenner, introduced last month a law called the Cyber Security Enhancement and Consumer Data Protection Act of 2006 for Congress's consideration. This would penalise companies failing to notify the Secret Service or FBI of any electronic data breach if their archive holds information on 10,000 or more people or data on Federal employees.

Apart from the Army, the police are also very much in the news! This time it is the Swedish National Police who have been the victim of a denial of service attack, which put their Web site out of action for quite some time. It is reported that a few weeks earlier, they had raided an illegal file-sharing site called the Pirate Bay, an action that had been warmly commended by the Motion Picture Association of America. Naturally, the police drive against piracy had annoyed not merely Pirate Bay, but many movie buffs as well! It is this raid that had possibly triggered the assault on the police Web site. Can there be greater embarrassment to a law enforcement agency?

Pizza prank

Now something in a lighter vein, as long as you yourself are not the victim in the kind of prank that I am going to relate to you! A lady, Leslie of Washington DC, was startled recently when pizza worth $200 was delivered at her doorstep from two different restaurants. The fact was that she was not exactly such a pizza fan to order such monstrous quantity! Also, she just did not place an order for the stuff. Obviously, someone was trying to be funny with her.

In response to her query, the restaurant managers told her that they had in reality received orders for the pizza via IP relay services, which are Internet-based call services used by the deaf!

To add to Leslie's horror, the pizza was delivered against Leslie's credit card. She was puzzled how the prankster got to know details of her card. Then she was told that the two pizza joints had on their record her card numbers - because somebody in her household had ordered pizza from them in the past - and on receiving the latest order, they had automatically charged her card. Can there be anything more exasperating to a housewife already weighed down by domestic chores? So, be careful, when you order your next round of pizzas!

The writer is a former CBI Director who is currently Adviser (Security) to TCS Ltd.

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