Italy has huge market for encrypted cell phones


Is this the wave of the future for all countries?
Given Italy's notorious phone problems, this doesn't surprise me.

“Initially, we thought we would market to the big businesses, to lawyers and the government,” said Ferdinando Peroglio, commercial director of Caspertech, a four-year-old company in Turin that sells encrypted cellphone software. “But after the Juventus soccer scandal, we had so many clients that we had never thought to contact.”
Three years ago, the company’s only clients were the government and the military; last year 60 percent of sales were to ordinary civilians.

Mr. Peroglio declined to provide exact sales numbers, but said that Caspertech’s sales increased 100 percent from 2005 to 2006.

Enrico Comana, chief executive of Snapcom Italia, the Italian unit of an Israeli company that offers a similar product, sees the same trend.

“There is about 700 to 800 percent more interest now than at the same time last year,” he said.

What has spurred encryption sales is not so much the legal wiretapping authorized by Italian magistrates — though information about those calls is also frequently leaked to the press — but the widespread availability of wiretapping technology over the Internet, which has created a growing pool of amateur eavesdroppers. Those snoops have a ready market in the Italian media for filched celebrity conversations.

I fully expect the market to expand in other countries as well.

Of course, I expect the governments of those nations to resist it with everything they can.

Even if moderate encryption and scrambling becomes common, it decreases the effectiveness of eavesdropping. Cell phones are becoming advanced enough to handle encryption and decryption without going through an external server, smart phones can already handle it. The one restriction is that the software isn't widely available.

But from an eavesdroppers perspective, encrypted calls are a problem because cracking an encryption requires much more computing power than encrypting or decrypting with a key.

Which of course is why various government agencies want a backdoor hardwired into computers and cell phones.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Thu - May 3, 2007 at 04:24 PM  Tag


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