I am ready to speak at LinuxCon 2009 next month in Portland, but I do wonder if LinuxCon is really ready for me ;). My topic is “GNU Telephony and Communication Privacy for a Free Society” and really is about things I had been working on as part of the GNU Telephony Secure Calling initiative the past few years. It could be said the inspiration for this project came out of the New York City civil liberties community in the early part of the decade, although much important work had been done by volunteers and contributors in Europe such as Werner Dittman and Federico Pouzols, and the GNU Project officially adopted and hosts the packages we have produced.
The GNU Telephony Secure Calling initiative was originally formed specifically to make passive voice communication intercept a thing of the past. While it is true that technological means for mass communication intercept has grown with incremental improvements in communication technology, the means to apply and use encryption techniques to counter these abuses and offer communication privacy on a large scale using free software have also become possible. In particular, I will be speaking next month about how the GNU ZRTP stack (and our related ZRTP4J used in SIP communicator), ZRTP enabled clients such as Twinkle, and all tied together using GNU SIP Witch, can be used to create and deploy network scalable secure VoIP solutions for individuals, private organizations, and even national governments.
I had wanted to talk more and specifically about GNU SIP Witch easily on Ubuntu GNU/Linux, as sipwitch has been my main focus in the project the past year and I would like to see Debian based distros become more prominent for deploying telecommunications services including of course for secure VoIP, but alas, as Brian Proffitt knows, I was struggling with strange editing issues with this site last night, and he has offered to separately post an article about this for me. However, there is a preliminary copy of my presentation next month now available at http://www.gnutelephony.org/data/linuxcon2009.odp for those curious about my talk.
