Re: [IP] FCC order on VOIP snooping

Lee (and Dave), The good news is that the recent FCC orders (last fall and last Wednesday) only extended CALEA (wiretapping design mandates) to reach broadband service providers and "interconnected" VoIP providers (i.e., VoIP providers that offer a service that can both connect calls out to the PSTN, the regular phone network, and receive calls from the PSTN). So in its current form (as you describe it) the peer- to-peer audio system would not be covered by CALEA. The bad news is that if the FCC's extension of CALEA is upheld in the face of legal challenges, it is certainly possible that the FCC would eventually try to extend CALEA to all voice-capable technologies on the Internet. But the good news is that this past Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in Washington heard oral argument in four consolidated challenges to the extension of CALEA (including one brought by CDT), and two of the three judges were very skeptical of the theory on which the FCC extended CALEA to broadband. Indeed, Judge Edwards called the FCC's reasoning "gobbledygook" and "totally ridiculous." See, e.g., http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2006/05/05/AR2006050501032.html. One certainly cannot be sure how the court will come out based on an oral argument, and the court was less strong on the VoIP side of the challenge, but overall the argument was a very good sign. John Morris Center for Democracy & Technology At 2:40 PM -0400 5/6/06, David Farber wrote:

Begin forwarded message:

From: Lee Revell Date: May 6, 2006 11:40:09 AM EDT To: David Farber Subject: FCC order on VOIP snooping

http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-265221A1.pdf

I have a question for the lawyers on IP (not looking for free legal advice, just your thoughts ;-).

I just returned from presenting a paper at the 4th Linux Audio Conference in Karlsruhe, Germany and there's currently a lot of work on low latency, high quality realtime audio over IP - the point of which is to allow musicians to collaborate (or "jam") live over the net. The upper latency limit between musicians for playing "live" is about 20-30ms so the speed of light prevents this from ever working beyond a few hundred miles, but it still should be quite useful.

Has there been any discussion of whether this kind of peer to peer audio system, which is not designed for VOIP but could obviously be used for that, would be affected? AFAICT having to implement CALEA would be the death of any such system, as it's simply a musician's peer to peer tool not a centralized operation, plus I can't imagine how you would implement CALEA without killing the latency.

Lee

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