The FCC released last Friday its CALEA First Report and Order covering law enforcement wire-tap access to VoIP and broadband providers. The order, adopted in early August, is controversial given that CALEA, the statute governing law enforcement’s ability to wiretap communications, specifically excluded “information services” from the wire-tap requirements.
The FCC has, however, interpreted CALEA to cover both VoIP and broadband services. Susan Crawford takes a dark view of the Commission’s interpretation, and offers an amusing translation of the legalese that the FCC puts forth to justify the extension of CALEA to services so clearly within the “information services” realm.
The Commission has found a couple of ways to avoid the “information services” exclusion. If this document could talk, it might say (I’m providing the words): First. “It doesn’t matter whether something is an information service, even though we’ve fought very very hard in other contexts to keep things in the category of information service, because CALEA should cover things that are ‘substantial replacements’ for traditional telephone service. We’re not going to require empirical evidence that anything is supplanting telephone service — instead, we’re going to look at the traditional functions of telephone service and see whether they’re being provided by something new. Here, broadband access is functionally just like dial-up access that used to be provided by local telephone companies. And VoIP services that are capable of interconnection with the telephone network are just like traditional telephone service. Packet switching and circuit switching are just the same, functionally, so by using the word ‘switch’ Congress must have meant to include transmission to and over the Internet. So both broadband access and interconnected VoIP are covered under CALEA.”
Cynthia Brumfield at 5:01 PM|Comments(0)
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