The IETF recently discussed the issues pertaining to wiretap on the Internet. A proposal by engineers working on Internet Telephony triggered a debate within the working group, which was reflected to IETF leadership, and ultimately became a discussion involving much of the IETF. The IETF considered a number of legal theories and national laws. Much of the discussion centered on a US law known as the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Agencies (FCC doc. CC Docket No. 97-213), or CALEA. However, since IETF specifications are used globally, IETF specifications for wiretap would have to take global law into account.
Two examples suffice to demonstrate the range of laws concerning legal intercept. In Sweden, a person’s privacy is paramount over many other issues, while the People’s Republic of China taps anything it likes. Most countries practice wiretap under some circumstances to gather evidence of criminal behavior or further other official interests.The issues in Wiretapping
Several proposals have been made which enhance law enforcement’s ability to gather intelligence and evidence on criminal activity in a world filled with computers. These include, at minimum, Key Escrow (also known as Key Recovery), Legal Intercept, banning or licensing of the export of encryption, and the outright ban of encryption.
Key EscrowThe premise underlying Key Escrow is a simple and seductive line of reasoning. If a person uses encryption to secure his data or his communications, clearly he is doing little more than throwing away his information unless he manages to remember the encryption key; this key could be escrowed for legal access.
If every access of the data requires an access of the database to obtain the key, two problems result. The repeated key transfer itself creates an opportunity for the illicit recovery of the key by an unauthorized person, and the necessity for the key transfer slows down access to the protected data by the time required to access the key from the network database. Beyond that, once a key escrow database or key recovery procedure has been instituted, the key is potentially available to anyone, and once a key has been obtained it is permanently known and all documents it protects are permanently accessible.
This loss of security and availability of the key undermines the fundamental purpose for which law enforcement sought access to the key. As a result, the use of the key to encrypt information is no longer prima facie evidence that the owner of the key is a criminal.
Legal InterceptA fundamental problem with legal intercept is that the nations have not agreed to a common law concerning wiretap, meaning that vendors must support individual national requirements separately. The substantive technical issues revolve around the fact that although tapping an Internet session is not fundamentally different than tapping a telephone session, Internet technology does not mirror telephone technology, around which procedures and laws for legal intercept are designed. As a result, either Internet wiretap requires us to enable law enforcement to successfully hack any computer in the Internet (a fact that hackers would welcome), or results beyond those in any well-defined warrant are highly likely.
Making encryption technology Illegal to sell to some countriesIf a particular nation's technology if of interest, a traveler can purchase a book and return home, or the equivalent web page can be accessed without travel, or the nation can develop its own technology. This is essentially ineffective, and hurts US vendors more than the banned country.
Banning EncryptionIf encryption is unlawful to use at all, it is unlawful to use to secure the Internet infrastructure, and the insecurity of the Internet is enshrined in law.
IETF decision on wiretap, and specifically on legal intercept The IETF believes that strong data privacy, implemented using strong authentication or encryption, is important for the development of Internet commerce and for the safety of both the infrastructure and its users. For the IETF to try to develop one comprehensive specification that supports the wiretap laws of every country would be an impossibly complex undertaking. In essence, the IETF concluded that these are national matters and are best left to national bodies.That observation, however, sidesteps some very difficult legal, societal, and technical problems that the members of the IETF community see.