CALEA

Wed May 11 18:58:30 UTC 2016

On Tue, 10 May 2016 17:00:54 -0400, Brian Mengel <bmengel at gmail.com> wrote:

> AFAIK being able to do a lawful intercept on a specific, named,
> individual's service has been a requirement for providers since 2007.

It's been required for longer than that. The telco I worked for over a  
decade ago didn't build the infrastructure until the FCC said they were  
going to stop funding upgrades. That really got 'em movin'. (suddenly  
"data services" people -- i.e. ME -- weren't redheaded stepchildren.)

> have never heard of a provider, big or small, being called out for being
> unable to provide this service when requested.

Where existing infrastructure is not already in place (read: T1/BRI/etc.),  
the telco can take up to 60 days to get that setup. I know more than one  
telco that used that grace period to actually setup CALEA in the first  
place.

> did not perform intercepts routinely.

The historic published figures (i've not looked in years) suggest CALEA  
requests are statistically rare. The NC based telco I worked for had never  
received an order in the then ~40yr life of the company.

> The mediation server needed to "mediate" between your customer  
> aggregation box and the LEA is not inexpensive.

And also is not the telco's problem. Mediation is done by the LEA or 3rd  
party under contract to any number of agencies. For example, a telco tap  
order would mirror the control and voice traffic of a POTS line (T1/PRI  
channel, etc.) into a BRI or specific T1 channel. (dialup was later added,  
but wasn't required in my era, so we didn't support it.) We used to test  
that by tapping a tech's phone. Not having any mediation software, all I  
could do is "yeap, it's sending data" and listen to the voice channels on  
a t-berd.

--Ricky