The government believes the real threat comes from encryption, but they’re wrong … The enabling technology is speech coding, or just data compression in general.
Predictor: Hales, Kevin
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Fred Hapgood covers the issues surrounding Internet telephony, interviewing Kevin Hales of Cogon Electronics Inc. Hapgood writes: ”A little-noted but exceptional feature of Internet telephony technologies is that the connections established by these devices range from difficult to – with encryption add-ons – flat-out impossible to tap. Filtering all the packets for a specific conversation out of a router-based network is doable, but nowhere near as straightforward as a conventional phone tap … In theory, governments could simply ban encryption, but there’s also another way to protect communications. ‘The government believes the real threat comes from encryption, but they’re wrong,’ says Kevin Hales of Cogon Electronics Inc. in Warrenton, Virginia. (Cogon produces the AquaFone, a highly secure phone system that connects modem-to-modem rather than over the Internet.) ‘The enabling technology is speech coding, or just data compression in general,’ says Hales. Data sufficiently compressed, he says, ‘can be hidden such that classic encryption isn’t even required.’ Hales suggests the best way to ensure a completely secure conversation is to scatter the bytes carrying the voice through a completely unrelated audio or video file, thus hiding the fact that the conversation is going on at all. Computers at both ends would filter the ‘real’ communication from the packaging, but anyone tapping the line would hear only (for example) two old friends playing a duet. Such a scheme defeats the key escrow idea because of the difficulty in identifying which communications are even encrypted and which should be required to produce an escrowed key.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Communication
Subtopic: Security/Encryption
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: IPhone: Will Telephony on the Net Bring the Telcos to Their Knees? Or Will it Allow Them to Take Over the Internet? (And, Oh, Yes, It’s Damn Hard to Tap)
Quote Type: Direct quote
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.10/iphone_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney