Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

While Condi Rice was quite content to think that Saddam might secretly be cooking up nukes, and any number of Bush officials have suggested that the terrorists are capable of sophisticated, high tech attacks, they seem to have missed something obvious.  If the terrorists are as capable as Bush officials maintain, then there's no way the wiretap program will catch them.  

In this simple 13 minute home video, Mark Burkell -- who makes no pretense of being a security expert -- explains how anyone  can easily defeat an attempt at wiretapping by using VOIP phones with freely available encryption routines.  According to Burkell, not only does Bush know he's lying about the need for the program, his administration doesn't even understand how telecommunications work.

Terrorists have their own telephone network, and they don't go through the regular switches.  Their networks are private, they're something that they can build themselves with off-the-shelves computer technology, and they're untappable.

Burkell -- whose video is even more effective at getting the point across because it's so obviously not the work of a professional -- goes on to demonstrate using the open source encryption tool, asterisk, and a cheap WiFi phone, how he can create his own private telephone network that can communicate without ever passing through the networks the NSA is tapping.  

Creating such a network takes only a few minutes.  A group of terrorists could easily create a new telephone network every day.  Even if the packets going across this network were somehow detected, the encryption features available make it impossible for even supercomputers to decrypt the signals in real time.

Burkell goes on to postulate that, knowing the wiretaps aren't really going to stop terrorists, the administration has put them in place only to get people more used to the idea of government intrusion into every aspect of their lives.  Maybe.  But the point that the wiretaps are useless is one that should be played up in every debate and discussion between now and election day.  

To believe that Bush's power grab has any meaning in the "war on terror," you have to believe at the same time that these people are capable of building "dirty bombs" or using biological weapons, but too stupid to figure out VOIP.

Of course, the Bush administration may actually be that stupid.  So far, every attempt to underestimate them has failed.