The End of Lawful Access
March 14, 2006 at 22:25 | 
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The recent federal election at least temporarily slowed the move towards the adoption in Canada of lawful access legislation - legislation that mandates that interception capability be built in by ISPs and telephone service providers. Lawful access legislation will likely make a reappearance. But as VoIP adoption begins to accelerate, VoIP encryption clients will become more common as well, and one really has to wonder where lawful access will end up. Today, news that Phil Zimmerman, the creator of PGP, has released Zfone, a Mac and Linux client that encrypts any SIP VoIP voice stream. A windows client is said to be on the way.
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I’m not convinced that VoIP encryption will be that widely adopted — encryption in general has a history of poor uptake. But even if Zfone or something like it becomes standard, there’s little reason to think it will have that much effect on lawful access, which has always focused on subscriber data and transmission data (IP addresses, records of visits to websites or of communications between specific individuals) rather than content. Encryption was brought up as an unresolved problem during the original consultation process, but like most other problems, the government basically ignored it.