At the time of the Cold War, if you wanted to have an extremely secure communication over an insecure communications channel, the only choice was to have somehow arranged an earlier secure communication over a secure channel.  The iconic image of a diplomatic courier handcuffed to a briefcase was no mere icon.  For many years at the height of the Cold War, the State Department distributed special phonograph disks to US embassies around the world containing the audio equivalent of the “one-time pads” that were used for secure encryption of character-based messages.  The briefcase containing the phonograph disk counted as the “earlier secure communication over a secure channel” that permitted a later secure communication over an insecure channel such as an international telephone call or a radio communication.  You can read about this program, called SIGSALY, in this Wikipedia article.  By now in 2019 you can have telephone calls that are nearly as secure as the SIGSALY communications, and there is no need for any “earlier secure communication over a secure channel”. And the equipment that you will use is inexpensive when compared with the prodigiously expensive SIGSALY equipment. Continue reading →

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This blog article is nominally an “office tech” article talking about how to encrypt your telephone traffic.  But it’s also a legal ethics article.  I suggest that the attorney’s ethical duty to preserve client confidences calls for the attorney to be continually aware of the confidentiality risks for various types of communications, and for the ways to protect those communications.  Today’s article talks about protecting your SIP telephone trunks, and it talks about how our firm’s favorite VOIP service provider has just now enhanced our options for protecting our SIP trunks. Continue reading →