On The Margins

Thursday August 05, 2004

[ Telecommunications ] Wiretapping VoIP and PoC

In a 5-0 preliminary ruling, the FCC has extended the wiretapping requirements of CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act) to VoIP (Voice over IP) and PoC (Push-to-talk on Cellular).

(The preliminary rulling does not affect, non-service-provided, peer-to-peer VoIP.)

See Tim Wu's blog for a brief on the economic and legal issues the ruling raises.

See Declan McCullagh and Ben Charny's report on news.com for a report and related material.

ACLU, Americans for Tax Reform, and Center for Democracy and Technology have already expressed their reservations against extending the CALEA to the Internet service providers.

What I want to highlight here briefly is some of the technical difficulties of wiretapping on the Internet as opposed to the traditional PSTN networks.

The major difficulty arises because of the built-in routing flexibilities in the Internet. In other words, what makes the Internet resilient to local failures also makes it harder to wiretap.

Packets can take different routes. For example, RTP (the real-time transport protocol), the most common protocol for conveying VoIP packets, does not require a reservation model along the lines of RSVP. The main thing about RTP as compared to TCP is that it does not retransmit "droped" or "lost" packets composing its "voice" or other media payloads.

Some of these difficulties of wiretapping could lead to business models where consumer devices have modules capable of actively participating in wiretapping. These business models are broken from the start.

Requiring that such devices be put in the consumer's hands may discourage use of the Internet and make it more expensive. Furthermore, alternate non-conforming but smart devices could be installed to defeat the purpose of wiretapping or to skirt it all together.

Taking the non-device-dependent approach, the level of coordination required for wiretapping on the network, through firewalls and other intermediaries, not to mention through a variety of routers and switches, is truly mind boggling.

Wiretapping solutions (independent of end-point device participation) will only be available at considerable cost. (As recorded in Declan McCullagh and Ben Charny's report on news.com, Verizon Wireless' lukewarm response to the FCC's preliminary ruling confirms these difficulties.)

Same technical issues and difficulties hold for Wiretapping PoC.

Finally, while congress appropriated $500 million to reimburse traditional PSTN phone companies for CALEA compliance, such compensation will apparently not be available to VoIP and PoC providers.

2004-08-05 18:05:26.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Web ] We the Media

The full content of Dan Gillmor's book, We the Media, is now available. The book discusses weblogs and more.

I would say the title is exaggerating the power of web-logs.

As I've noted below, the vast majority of the public relies on the common mass media (e.g. TV, Radio, etc.) as source of news, views, culture and more.

2004-08-05 10:13:51.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.

[ Philosophy ] Musings on Mass Culture

In his 2003 Aspen Institute information technology roundtable comments, John Seely Brown draws a distinction between mass and popular culture. As summarized by rapporteur, David Bollier:

In mass culture, meaning is generated and disseminated centrally, through television, radio, and film, for example. In popular culture, however, meaning is actively generated through a dynamic social process in which everyone can participate. People appropriate and change meaning as it suits their needs, tastes, and circumstances—a process that cultural anthropologists have called bricolage. The new forms of social participation and collaboration enabled by the Internet are creating new structures of identity and meaning.

I will try to write about Brown's ideas on a later occasion, but here are some immediate musings, not necessarily last thoughts, that follow along the lines Brown has set up.

The development of personal identity depends on social participation. Pure, non-participatory consumption creates only mechanical beings lost in the world.

Mass culture assumes, creates and regenerates consuming machines.

Popular culture requires participating creatures.

Andy Warhol's work celeberated mass culture and its icons but also tranforms them through a kind of participation which may, today, raise copyright issues. I'm not sure if such issues were raised when Warhol produced his work, for example, his Micky Mouse images.

Writing of weblogs is certainly a participatory activity but of course the possibilities and realities of disembodied communities and their resilience is a different matter all together worthy of a real dialogue.

As an example of popular culture, consider Tai Chi, as I saw it in Daqing, Harbin, Bejing, Chengdu, Xi'an, Kunming and Shanghai. People wake up in the morning, meet friends, do Tai Chi, have tea, walk to work, home or finish breakfast. One does all of this with no payments necessary and as the city walks by, or at least, that used to be the case in 1990 - 1991, when I lived and worked in China's north eastern provinces.

As an example of mass culture, consider aerobics exercises to the music of Britney Spears with the required equipment and the payments made to your local club. (I have to admit, I could be totally wrong with this particular example. There may be a real feeling of participation and community involvement that one feels when one joins these exercises or clubs for at least a short period while in the club. I doubt the feeling extends when one goes out into the city. In any case, there's nothing in the commercial activity of the usual clubs that would facilitate that. I'm basing my observation on limited personal observation as an outsider, not any real involvement of my own.)

When the producers of mass culture become overzealous in the perpetual protection of their revenue streams from cultural products, they lobby for laws that effectively banish to oblivion other cultural material. Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture describes this very salient point.

The trouble is that the vast majority of the U.S. public rely on non-participatory television, the greatest instrument of non-participatory mass culture, as a source of news and views.

2004-08-05 07:38:01.0 -- ; Permalink ; Trackback.