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Mobile phone call that killed

There is widespread speculation about the actual details of the event that happened on April 21, 1996. However all reports agree that the Chechnyen rebel leader Dzhokhar Dudayev was killed when a Russian fighter fired two laser guided missiles at him Overkill you may think.

At the time of the attack, Dudayev had been talking on his mobile satellite phone to Russian officials in Moscow about possible peace negotiations. The call was traced and the location of the phone isolated sufficiently quickly for the attack to take place. The real speculation is around the involvement of the American satellites in the intercept and subsequent attack. It is widely believed that the Russians did not possess the technology at the time and the Americans believed it in their best interest to intervene.

So the question is - if Mr Dudayev had made that call using a VoIP technology such as that from Cloud Net Connect - would he have survived the day? The answer has to be yes. Tracking VoIP conversations is almost impossible.

A lot more recently telephone companies in Russia have asked Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to shut down VoIP in the country.

Russian businesses have banded together to lobby against VoIP services such as that provided by Cloud Net, arguing that the technology poses a threat to national security, as well as their business.

The lobby, called the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, is working with Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's political party to draft "legal safeguards" against VoIP services. It reckons 40 per cent of telephone calls could be completed using VoIP services by 2012.

"Without government restrictions, IP telephony causes certain concerns about security," Reuters reports a lobby press release as saying. "Most of the service operators working in Russia, such as Skype and Icq, are foreign. It is therefore necessary to protect the native companies in this sector and so forth."

Vitaly Kotov, Vice President of TTK, the telecoms division of state-owned Russian Railways, said that a free market for VoIP services in Russia will likely result in "a likely and uncontrolled fall in profits for the core telecom operators."

The group also argued that VoIP conversations frustrate lawful interception (wiretapping) by law enforcement agencies.

However Russian telephone companies have been losing cash to VoIP outfits. Some enterprising Russians have even set up shops for people to make cheap untraceable calls.