Voice

Last week Glenn Greenwald at The Guardian broke the news that Verizon has been providing the NSA with metadata about all of the calls over a subsidiary’s network. This subsidiary is called Verizon Business Network Services. It is a privately held company that “owns, operates, monitors, and maintains data and Internet networks in North America, Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, Japan, and Africa. The company provides converged communication solutions, such as local and long-distance voice, messaging, and Internet access services. [Read More]

The journey towards anonymous and secure voice communication is a long one. There’s lots of roadblocks to get your voice from point A to point B over the Internet if you need to prevent eavesdropping or censorship. There is the limited bandwidth of mobile data connections. There is the high latency of the TCP protocol. To achieve anonymity via Tor, there’s even more latency added to each packet. Mumble is a non-standard protocol that was originally designed for realtime voice chat for video games. [Read More]

Voice calls over Tor are supposed to be impossible. It seems this may no longer be the case. Without being able to do voice over IP (VOIP) conversations over the Tor network, people are prevented from being able to route calls outside of censored networks. People ask us if there is any way they can route voice traffic through Tor to avoid blocks. To our surprise, we tested Skype and found that it can work acceptably over Orbot. [Read More]

MAY 2011: Learn more about our new efforts on the Open Secure Telephony Network at https://guardianproject.info/wiki/OSTN – we currently recommend the CSipSimple Android app instead of SIPDroid, for secure voice calls. Near the very top of Guardian’s open-source application suite wish list is something that might seem like a no-brainer for a secure mobile device: voice. When we take into account network performance and audio fidelity requirements, as well as the International nature of Guardian’s target users (everything from average citizens to multi-national journalists or humanitarian organizations), the prospect of a truly real-time secure VOIP solution starts to reveal itself as quite the challenge. [Read More]

As part of rolling out the first-phase of The Guardian Project, I will be writing short reviews of existing applications for Android-based mobile phones that share our general goals or desired functionality. The goal of Guardian, in short, is to enable safe and secure communication for activists, organizers and advocates working for good around the world through the mobile phones they carry in their pockets. The Guardian project has no official relationship with these apps or their creators, but as we work towards developing our own unique software, we want to make sure to shine the spotlight on existing efforts that we admire and which are currently available. [Read More]