Project:Disruptive Telecoms
Background:
Telephone networks are largely owned and controlled by large corporations. These corporations gather significant amounts of information on users and supply this to our government on request, see the links below.As a supporter of personal privacy and liberty this disturbs me greatly.
This project aims to develop some configuration tools that will allow non telecoms experts to quickly set-up their own secure telephone infrastructure. Another aim is to be able to easily link these autonomous systems together to provide federated, decentralised telephone systems.
These seem like grandiose ambitions but they are within reach. The move of telephone systems from circuit switched to packet switched has been a game changer. Systems were once built from proprietary hardware costing millions running over monopoly controlled copper (think BT). They can now be built from free software and run over the internet. We are spoilt for choice as regards free telephony software: Asterisk, OpenSIPS, Repro etc but VOIP is a complicated beast to configure and deploy. I'd like to build a simple web based tool that would allow a geek with minimal VOIP knowledge to set-up this system. It will allow the set-up of accounts/extensions and also the set-up of audio conferencing functionality. The web based tool would also allow remote provisioning of SIP phones. I initially only plan to support jitsi softphones but more clients could be added later.
Proposed plan:
A SIP proxy would deal with registration, presence and routing. I have a bias towards Repro because of its ease of deployment and support of mutual TLS authentication. The audio conferencing would be done by Asterisk. The configuration would be stored, where possible, in a mysql database and modified via a PHP based web tool that we would write. After getting the system working on one server we would install on a second and test inter-domain routing. i.e. federated VOIP.
Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_data_retention http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulation_of_Investigatory_Powers_Act_2000 http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/may/11/police-software-maps-digital-movements http://www.opentelecoms.org/federated-voip-quick-start-howto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk_%28PBX%29 http://www.resiprocate.org/About_Repro https://jitsi.org/
