The Swiss government planning to put wiretaps on VoIP conversations
It is harder to monitor VoIP calls because servers and connections often sit in foreign countries, commonly the US, and a country’s law enforcement agency can not exercise the same power of discovery that they can over a phone provider’s records. Calls can also be harder to trace when they are free, since there is no billing record.
A report from a Swiss newspaper SonntagsZeitung says that the Swiss Department of the Environment, Transport, Energy and Communications is examining the use of a software to listen to VOIP conversations.
The software being assessed comes from Swiss company Era IT Solutions. The software is placed on to a user’s computer by that person’s internet service provider, but only on the orders of a judge, according to current plans.
The software records ongoing conversations and sends the recordings in broken up data packets back to a server controlled by the authorities. The software is also capable of monitoring what is going on in the room in which a computer is located. It can switch on a computer’s microphone so that the room itself can be eavesdropped on, according to the report.
The Swiss Surveillance Act does not allow for Trojan horse-type surveillance but federal criminal regulations do allow software-based wiretaps as long as they are controlled in the same manner as other surveillance equipment.