VoIP spy killed

A surveyor of electronic intelligence was murdered while trying to catch terrorists who were using Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to plan their attacks.

The technology expert Gareth Williams had founded a programme called Echelon. Echelon was set up in the Cold war to sift through email and other communications information such as mobile VoIP. The idea was to look for phrases which might indicate a national security threat.

His murder has led to fears about sensitive intelligence leaking out from top level British and the United States computers. The programme intercepted over five billion communications every day using mathmatical geniuses and algorithms to crack codes.

Williams himself was posted with MI6 computer intelligence in Afghanistan, the NSA cryptology centre in Colorado as well as Fort Meade in Maryland where the US National Security Agency is based.

Extracting information from internet phone calls was one of his main projects. That is because technologies like Skype are not yet intercepted by government forces in the same way that normal phone calls are.

In 2008 the British Intelligence and Security Committee said: "One of the greatest challenges is to maintain intercept capability despite rapidly evolving communications technology. This especially concerns the growth of use by terrorists of voice over internet telephony and other internet-based communications."


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