Marketing tool for VoIP: We make it more difficult for the NSA to eavesdrop on you

Skype is offering VoIP as an alternative to conventional phone calls, and it already has some 75 million users. VoIP has advantages over regular phone calls, chief among them is the low price. There is another advantage: It is more difficult for the NSA to eavesdrop on VoIP users. The Internet’s diffused architecture and its facility for privacy make it much more difficult to ascertain the identity and location of users and the substance of their conversations.

Internet communications are broken down into discrete units, or packets, which travel through the global network along different, often circuitous, routes before being reassembled at the destination. To intercept packets, devices called “sniffers” are placed at various communication nodes to scan traffic as it passes, looking for interesting packets, and reassembling them coherently. If the NSA has an e-mail address to target, catching the message is relatively simple — the agency put a sniffer near the user’s Internet service provider. The NSA’s warrantless eavesdropping program also involves looking for suspicious patterns — not only specific, known individuals — in a sea of communications. The NSA may not know what it is looking for, so it has to examine a lot of data. Put another way, “If you can’t find the needle, you have to take the haystack,” said Doug Graham, a security expert with BusinessEdge Solutions and a former surveillance-systems operator with the Royal Air Force.

The legal debate now taking place in the United States is precisely over the whether or not it is constitutional for the NSA to “take the haystack” in order to see whether or not there is a needle there somewhere.