December 15, 2014
The dilemma of either conversations should be intercepted or not, when you talk on the phone will never end for sure especially in the US. Now, Verizon, one of the biggest carriers from the country, became the latest big company to enter the post-Snowden market for secure communication. They manage to do so thanks to an encryption standard which permits, according to law of course, to access ostensibly secure phone conversations.
The product introduced on the market couple of days ago has the name of Verizon Voice Cypher and the encryption is owned by a company called Cellcrypt. This company offers both business and government customers end-to-end encryption for voice calls on all big OS: iOS, Android or BlackBerry, but all is possible only by using a special application which provides secure communications for its users, if we consider that it even can connect to an organizations’ secure cell phone system.
Still, this initiative follows some strict measures as nobody wants that the situation of wiretapping can escape out of control. So, both of the companies involved, Cellcrypt and Verizon, state that communications that take place over Voice Cypher can be access only under a prove that it is a reason enforced by the law to take this in consideration. "It's only creating a weakness for government agencies. Just because a government access option exists, it doesn't mean other companies can access it", said Seth Polansky, the Cellcrypt’s vice president for North America.
The US law requires important phone carriers like Verizon to build a system of networks that can be wiretapped. Don’t know for sure how most people see this fact, but it can be really tricky in perceptions at least. But the legislation says that the phone carriers can decrypt communications for the government only if they developed a technology to can do so. In this case, if they structured their encryption so that neither company had the necessary information to decrypt calls, they would not have been breaking the law.