S.2281 Hearing (was: Justice Dept: Wiretaps...)
John Curran
jcurran at istaff.org
Sun Jun 20 03:02:33 UTC 2004
The particular hearing that set this all off is the Senate Commerce
Committee's review of S.2281 ("VoIP Regulatory Freedom Act") that
took place on last Wednesday, and in general, the hearing has a
higher content to noise ratio than the resulting press coverage.
The agenda and statements of the participants can be found here:
<http://commerce.senate.gov/hearings/witnesslist.cfm?id=1230>
S.2281 takes the middle of the road position in areas such as lawful
intercept, universal service fund, and E911. At a high-level, those
VoIP services which offer PSTN interconnection (and thereby look like
traditional phone service in terms of capabilities) under S.2281 pick up
the same regulatory requirements. Those VoIP services which do not
interconnect are continue to be treated as "information services" and
therefore excluded from these requirements.
With respect to facilitating lawful intercept, the opening comments of
Ms. Laura Parsky (Deputy Assistant Attorney General, US DoJ) and
James Dempsey, Executive Director of the Center for Democracy and
Technology (CDT) are quite informative. The DoJ view is that S.2281
is not enough, and any service using switching or transport should
facilitate lawful intercept. This position has the advantage of clarity,
but there are lots of communications (chat/IM/etc) that are going to
hard to decode and make readily available as needed. It is also an
expansion of the current framework of CALEA, which specifically sets
aside information services including email and messaging.
The CDT position is interesting, noting that CALEA came into being to
address concerns that law enforcement wouldn't be able to readily
pursue lawful intercept orders without directly mandating call intercept
capacity in each service provider. This works fine with one application
(voice) but that replicating this model for data services makes no sense
given the diversity of Internet communications applications. CDT proposes
that if law enforcement really needs better intercept capabilities for data
applications, it should work on its own decode capabilities or get service
bureaus to handle that same, and that the Internet service providers
shouldn't have to do anything other supply a copy of the relevant users
raw packet stream...
Despite the angst on both sides, requiring just those VoIP services
which look like traditional phone service (due to PSTN interconnection)
as requiring ready lawful intercept capacity will result in the equivalent
situation as we have today with CALEA, and appears to be the likely
outcome of the debate.
Apologies for length,
/John
More information about the NANOG
mailing list