[asterisk-biz] FCC ruling that requires all VoIP providers tomakewiretapping

[trixter aka Bret McDanel]

On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 07:32 -0600, Charles Vance wrote:
> As long as the wiretap is done on the basis of a curt order having
> sufficient probable cause it is no different than what government and
> law enforcement has been doing for years, but this new homeland
> security crap of doing taps without anyone in the judiciary approving
> it is unlawful and nobody should bend to it.
>  
without getting into legal issues such as the constitution places the
president in the role of commander in chief and allows for foreign
intelligence and every president in the last 30 years has monitored
international calls (which are now called 'domestic survielance' for
some reason), the CALEA issue with VoIP has other ramifications.

The only VoIP providers that are required to do CALEA (the laws that put
a $10k fine/day/switch if you dont have tapping capability) are the
providers that are interconnected wtih the PSTN.  That means that places
like FWD probably wont have to (some of their PSTN gateways have unclear
ownership, but odds are they will do whatever it takes to avoid that).
However companies like vonage must.  Now all the real phone companies
already have CALEA support so what is gained?

PC-PC calls are gained by  this, which opens the door to say that non
interconnected providers need to also do CALEA, which opens the door for
all email, web, irc, IM, etc services to also have this requirement.
This is the biggest argument that was made against this by  the lawyers
involved.

The other thing that is gained is if any foreign ITSP provides service
in the US an argument can be made (I dont know how successfully though)
that becuase they are doing business in the US (technically the US
viewes internet transactions as happening in both places at the same
time, which isnt that unreasonable, and has been used to go after
companies like paypal when they do evil things for no reason).  This
means that foreign ITSPs may have to shut down any US customers access
or implement CALEA requirements.  It may be tricky however to actually
serve a warrant (I'd say near impossible to serve one that has any
meaning, but I dont know what treaties are in place).


> 
-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
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