With the National Security Agency (NSA) and God knows who else eavesdropping on your telephone calls, there’s never been more of a need for effective ways to make your conversations unintelligible for anyone who might care to listen in. However, traditional phone encryption systems simply aren’t effective, with government officials boasting that they have never encountered a situation where they couldn’t recover "plain text" from an encrypted telephone conversation.
That’s beginning to change with the advent of encryption systems for voice communication over the Internet, via the "Voice over Internet Protocol" or VOIP. One of the best-known VOIP systems is Skype (www.skype.net), which automatically encrypts conversations over the Internet. However, Skype won’t release its "source code" so there’s no way to know whether or not the company has programmed "back doors" into the software. Still, Skype is a good start to protect your conversations against casual eavesdropping.
A better solution may come from civil liberties hero Philip Zimmerman, who almost went to jail for developing Pretty Good Privacy (PGP), one of the first effective and trusted programs to encrypt e-mail messages and computer files. Zimmerman has now developed a program called Zfone (http://zfoneproject.com) to encrypt VoIP calls. And in an effort to demonstrate that there are no backdoors, Zimmermann has made Zfone’s source code publicly available for review by experts.
Zfone’s early version aren’t easy to use, but they’re improving fast. Still, Zimmermann’s effort to build encryption into VoIP systems may is on a collision course with new rules that will force VOIP providers to build in back doors for "point and click" Internet surveillance, with a looming deadline of May 14, 2007 for full implementation.
