Bicom Telecom

VADODARA: They need not bother about wiretaps, radio surveillance,bugs that intrude digital privacy, or the fear of being eavesdropped during cellular conversations any more - local mafias seem to be a step ahead when it comes to using technology. 

Their latest love if you had asked them is internet telephony. From hawala transactions, fixing extortion rates, confirming drug deals to betting on cricket matches, you name it, they do it.

Internet telephony or VoIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) has emerged as a popular medium for middlemen to address demands of the murky world, leaving intelligence and law enforcement agencies beleaguered as these new-age malefactors erode their ability to keep tab over them.  

Twenty-six year old, Mustaffa Arif is a middleman for 30 odd customers spread across New York , Mumbai and Kenya . He helps route hawala transactions worth Rs 7 crore a month among these places.

"I get 0.2 per cent of the amount that has been transacted. Most of my calls are PC-to-PC leaving no chance for monitoring agencies to tap my conversations," says Arif.  

Arif communicates with his aides at least twice a week, once the deals are in place, he fixes a brokerage and the amount is shared. "Most of my customers are in Mumbai. My job is to sit here and broker deals," says Arif.

Rajiv Patel has links with drug dealers in Mumbai, he takes care of their payments and makes sure that both the supplier as well as the receivers get their payments in time, "My dealers are in Nepal , Sri Lanka and Kenya . All I have to ensure is that the transaction happens at the right time and at the right place. I have membership of at least 25 web based dialler networks and use any local internet cafe for making calls", says Patel.  

"Unlike regular PSTN lines which are centralised networks, wiretapping conversations is easier. But eavesdropping on VoIP calls which are decentalised networks, is next to impossible", says the director of D2V cafi Dushyant Patel.

In case of a VoIP call to a regular telephone line, voice is broken down into small packets of encrypted data and then routed to the destination through a gateway operated by an ISP.  

A 'codec' (coder-decoder) software that comes built-in with the VoIP dialer maps the dialed number at the gateway and routes these data packets to the receiver through the local PSTN exchange after decrypting them.

"Sniffing through a sheer magnitude of data packets in forms of e-mails and VoIP that is being transacted across an IP network makes the problem even worse", says a network security engineer Parag Parikh.

"To scan through all the data and then zero in on a particular type of voice packet would require to implement the 'codec' algorithm that would break into the packet and decode the conversations. But that would require at least a year, and I don't think anyone talks that long", adds Parikh.