As you can read on the page about TOR, new so-called "laws against terror" have been introduced in several countries in the wake of September 11th, 2001. This legislation permits increased eavesdropping of telephone and data transmission. One result of this is that it has become a lot more easy for the police and the intelligence agencies to find out whom you are speaking to on your phone. In many countries, they do not even need a permission from court!
If you are not happy with this sort of surveillance, it is still possible to avoid it. One possibility is using phone over the internet.
Phone over internet comes in different versions. You might have heard of Skype, but we in IT-Political Association of Denmark recomend you to use SIP or another open standard. That way you have the possibility of choosing a provider that you like and trust.
Anonymity can be secured by registring a SIP accout with a provider that does not ask for any legitimation. If the provider does not know you, it is impossible for the police to force information about you from him. If you cannot find such a provider in your country, you can even use a foreign provider.
With your anomynous IP phone account you can walk into an internet café and use your laptop as a telephone - or take a SIP phone with you. Maybe you can just find an open wireless network. In this way it is impossible to figure out who you are when you call somebody.
If your friends also have an anomynous IP phone account, then you can have conversations that are impossible to track. You can also use an encrypted version of SIP so that is impossible to listen in on your conversation. And if you use the same provider, it is often free.
This demonstrates how futile many of the IT related anti-terror initiatives are: several ways to avoid eavesdropping and tracing exist - and they are all completely legal.
As a result the anti-terror laws only harms the innocent citizens, and the laws do not give the desired results.
IT-Political Association of Denmark have made a SIP-registration with a Danish SIP provider, Musimi, and paid a small amount of money to that accout. As long as some money is left on this account, you can have a free call with this CD. Using a internet café or a wireless network, it will be impossible to trace you.
The only thing you have to do, is to open the program "Twinkle", on the desktop. In the field "Call" you type in the number, you want to call. Note: Since our SIP provider is located in Denmark, you have to enter 00 + the international code for your country before the number (e.g. 0032 for Belgium and 0049 for Germany). Clicking the "Dial"-button starts the call!
A lot of people probably want to try this, so keep your conversation short - there is a fixed amount on the account, and it will only work as long as there is any money. We have made a limitation so that it will only work with phone numbers that are reasonably cheap to call from Denmark.
You should also be aware that everyone trying this CD will use the same phone number. They cannot listen to your conversation, but if someone tries to return your call, the IP-phone will ring at everyone using this CD at the same time.
If you also want to avoid the risk of being traced to the internet café or network you are using, you can use TOR to anonymise your internet traffic. However, this delays the traffic a bit, so it is best used for mail or file exchange. At this point, we cannot recommend TOR for phone calls.
ZPhone is not Open Source and for that reason, it is not included on this CD. But ZPhone is free of cost and available for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.
miniSIP is an open source SIP client with encryption. It runs on Windows XP, Pocket PC, and Nokia Internet Tablets (Maemo). Use a PDA with WiFi and you have a cheap or free end-to-end encrypted alternative to mobile phones. Coverage is not as good as with normal mobile phones (e.g. GSM), but it is cheap and will not be tracked, eavesdropped or registred.
OpenMoko is an attempt to make a mobile phone completely based on open source software. It runs linux and has both GSM and WiFi, so it will probably be able to run an open source encrypted SIP client (like Twinkle). At the time of writing (February 2008), the final version of the first OpenMoko phone is not released, but check the web site for details.