India wants to ban international VoIP calls

David Heath
Thursday, 17 September 2009 09:21

IT Industry - Market

Indian security organisations are unable to trace VoIP calls and want them blocked until they are able to do so.

A variety of Indian focussed news sites are reporting that India's Intelligence Bureau (IB) has requested the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) block all Voice over IP (VoIP) calls into and out of the country.

In an embarrassing admission, the IB has confessed that it has no ability to identify the origin of incoming calls nor the destination of outbound VoIP calls.

The bureau stated that, "In the absence of Caller Line Identification (CLI) parameters of calls landing from abroad, it is next to impossible to identify the country of location of the caller. Moreover, of late a number of service providers in India have started providing VoIP solutions for making calls both domestics as well as foreign. The calls passing through the VoIP/IP route contain inadequate parameters rendering it impossible to trace the actual callers. As DoT had conveyed that it is not possible to mandate transmission of CLI from abroad, we had approached DoT to block such calls till a technical solution is found."

In other parts of the world, USA and Europe for instance, regulations require sufficient information to permit government tracking however such regulations and technology do not exist in India.

This is likely to have a very severe impact on a large number of call centres that rely heavily on VoIP systems for outbound calling.

Just like airport security screening (and the confiscation of excess liquids), this is yet another case of the authorities banning something used by many people just because a few use it for malicious purposes.

As one commenter on one of the sites mentioned earlier suggested, "They should ban trousers, since terrorists use them."

Chalk up another win to the bad guys.