The Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Center for Democracy and Technology and Pulver.com plan to file a notice of appeal tomorrow at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit regarding the FCC’s extension of wiretapping requirements to VoIP providers. The group maintains that the Commission’s August rulemaking that extends these requirements under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) is in fact in violation of that law.
That order was adopted August 6, but the full text of the decision wasn’t released until late September, and the official version of the rules weren’t published in the Federal Register until about nine days ago. The FCC’s extension of CALEA to VoIP has been controversial from the start, with many legal scholars contending that the 1994 specifically excluded “information services” from CALEA requirements.
According to Susan Crawford,
Congress specifically elected to leave out of CALEA’s coverage “information services, such as electronic mail services, or on-line services, such as Compuserve, Prodigy, America On-line or Mead Data, or Internet service providers”
CALEA did, however, extend these requirements to telecommunications providers, or common carriers of telecommunications. In adopting the FCC’s order, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin said that CALEA can justifiably be extended under the Act to VoIP providers because these newcomers are fulfilling the roles of common carriers.
Cynthia Brumfield at 3:50 PM|Comments(1)
Well done. The wiretapping requirements are rather ridiculous.
Posted by: Erick Erickson at October 25, 2005 7:01 AM
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