Big Brother is watching you online

A bit of a scary side to the VoIP buzz has hit the media this week. At forefront is the Comverse “options backdating scandal,” an Enron-type scam, replete with offshore bank accounts and executives on the lam.

Comverse is / was (we’ll see about the firm’s current existence anon, to be sure) a firm that develops and markets telecommunications software with a specialty in providing value-added services to third-party telecommunication service providers.

By late August, the FBI had managed to capture and apprehend Comverse’s former CFO David Kreinberg and former general counsel William Sorin on charges of siphoning funds and defrauding stockholders.

Former CEO Jacob Alexander, however, evaded capture and had managed to slip out of the U.S. and out of sight of U.S. authorities. In his pocket was about US $60 million in illegally gotten gains. Later, he was captured in good ol’ Sri Lanka.

How?

Because Alexander was foolish enough to place a one-minute telephone call via Skype. Intelligence agencies “somehow” tracked Alexander thanks to the call made in Columbo, Sri Lanka, and a private detective ultimately found him in the town of Negombo.

Skype representatives have told media sources that the firm offers “confidentiality but not anonymity,” and as one news source put it, “Quite how [Alexander] was tracked down remains unclear.”

Left to speculate on the question, each media outlet will do exactly that. The cynic would say that we’ll never know the full story, but the United Kingdom’s newspaper “The Register” did some nice deductive reasoning. It goes something like this:

The United States’ Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act gives federal investigators the authority to tap phone lines, including those of cellular phones. This power does not currently extend to VoIP. However, if a monitoring order had been issued to Skype, Alexander’s user IP was tracked after his identity was verified.

Scary stuff, indeed.

Thanks to ultra-paranoid policies in the United States regarding communications rights, the Alexander story is just another reason to watch what you say, President Hillary Clinton or no. Yes, the system is theoretically designed to capture the lawbreakers, but involving Skype and an unnamed private investigator shows that the red, white and blue feds have little respect for boundaries at all. And don’t forget that American technology is installed worldwide. Freedom of speech…?