[asterisk-biz] FCC ruling that requires all VoIP providers tomake wiretapping capabilities available to the U.S. government

[William Boehlke]

In addition to tapping and recording you have to be able to provide a way to
capture a variety of other information as defined by the law.  www.calea.org
has a wealth of information if you join.  

You should also have a formal way to record each lawful intercept, provide
the data to law enforcement without sharing it with your employees, and
prevent unauthorized people from tapping their friends and neighbors. 



-----Original Message-----
From: asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com
[mailto:asterisk-biz-bounces at lists.digium.com] On Behalf Of trixter aka Bret
McDanel
Sent: Tuesday, June 13, 2006 11:54 AM
To: email at mattruby.com; Commercial and Business-Oriented Asterisk Discussion
Subject: Re: [asterisk-biz] FCC ruling that requires all VoIP providers
tomake wiretapping capabilities available to the U.S. government

On Tue, 2006-06-13 at 13:51 -0400, Matthew Rubenstein wrote:
> 	Some people are discussing whether Skype's "free calls" gets them
out 
> of these requirements:
> http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060612/1722232.shtml .

My opinion generally is no, becuase the law doesnt say if you charge for it,
only if you provide it.  Further calls to the US are not free if you are
outside the US (or at least mexico where a friend currently is and based on
what appears to be IP verification he is told he has to pay).
So that seems to counter the 'quacks like a duck' argument since they are
indeed selling calls to the US for some people, and
skype/ebay/paypal/everything_else  state that its only until dec 31 2006, ie
a promotional thing.  As such it would be a hard argument indeed to say that
becuase they are running a promo they arent really providing phone service.

This means that trxtel "the voip provider that pays you" must also provide
CALEA support, however trxtel has a harder time since we currently do not
have any accounts.  No usernames or logins, no way to tell one customer from
another.  It is something we are reviewing to see if we can still operate
the way that we want to and comply.  Accounts will be created when the DID
beta finishes (should be within a month or
so) and we start paying people for inbound DIDs calls as well.  Accounts
must be enabled for inbound only traffic since we have to know who to route
the DID to.

We truely have an argument that we are different in that we dont charge our
customers, we pay them, but our lawyers tell us that its not worth it even
if that were a valid argument, but assure us they dont believe it to be a
valid argument.

We shall see, I am sure that they will go after the bigger people first for
any infractions, however CALEA generally doesnt allow them to inspect your
switch to ensure complaince, its only when they get a warrant and you tell
them you cant tap because you have no facilities to do that that you get
into trouble.  

Tapping isnt that hard depending on what you want to do, ranch networks
makes an asterisk plugin that works with their stuff (basically port
replication that sends the RTP stream to two points, the sniffer box and the
real destination.  On smaller setups you can use the monitor command
(however that will cripple busy servers).  

Some people have set up asterisk boxes where 1 is the 'tap box' and it
records any call that gets sent to it, then by adjusting their sip proxies
on a per customer basis they can tap everything from that customer without
too much trouble.  Inbound can be a bit trickier since you may have pris
scattered over a few machines and they all need to be able to record without
dropping packets all over the floor where they make a mess.


-- 
Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com     Bret McDanel
Belfast IE +44 28 9099 6461    DE +49 801 777 555 3402
Utrecht NL +31 306 553058      US WA +1 360 207 0479
US NY +1 516 687 5200          FreeWorldDialup: 635378
http://www.trxtel.com the VoIP provider that pays you!