Tapped out

Phone-tapping used to mean a quick click of mouse to extract the right conversations from computerised exchanges. VOIP services are based on the session initiation protocol (SIP), a TCP/IP-based application layer signaling protocol that lets computers find each other on the Internet. Tapping only becomes easy if the SIP VoIP call is made from a fixed location with a fixed Internet address connecting directly to a big Internet provider´s access router. Interception and extraction would then require hardware in the ISP´s network capable of identifying the media packets and converting them back to audio if the hardware can reverse any encryption used on the media.