ISP CALEA compliance

Thu May 24 00:23:42 UTC 2007

Martin Hannigan wrote:
> I had mentioned that both VeriSign and Neustar have people that are
> fluent in the
> technical and general legal issues as well as the legal aspects. It
> would seem to make more sense to solicit one of those organizations
> since NANOG is about operations, and not politics. The EFF is a
> political organization and these are not topics that make sense for
> NANOG, IMHO, the list, the program, or  a BoF.
> 
> Having the EFF explain CALEA at NANOG is like asking the Sierra Club
> to identify good
> sites for oil wells in forests.

I took a look at EFF's CALEA FAQ at 
http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/CALEA/?f=faq.html and they appear to 
have a pretty good handle on the technical issues. I can understand why VeriSign 
would prefer to leave EFF's viewpoint out of any discussion of CALEA, but I 
believe that VeriSign's perspective is just as political as EFF's. It's 
reasonable to think that VeriSign might employ people with better technical 
knowledge than EFF, but that doesn't mean that EFF's presentation would be less 
valuable than VeriSign's. Given their respective viewpoints (protecting 
individual rights and freedoms versus protecting corporate profits) maybe it 
would make sense to hear from both. Were EFF entirely clueless regarding the 
technical issues, I would agree that they should not be invited to NANOG, but 
that appears to not be the case.