At 09:37 PM 1/14/97 -0800, Lucky Green wrote:
At 02:48 PM 1/14/97 -0800, Alan Bostick wrote:
(Someone mentioned that they thought cordless phone intercepts weren't illegal the way cellular phone intercepts are. IANAL, but I recall that intercepting both was made illegal by the same legislation.)
It is illegal to intercept cell phone calls. It is legal under federal law to intercept cordless phones.
The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 <ftp://ftp.loc.gov/pub/thomas/c103/h4922.enr.txt> amended the federal wiretap statutes (18 USC 2510 et seq) to make interception of cordless calls illegal. Also, pursuant to the CALEA, the FBI reported yesterday (1/14) that they anticipate the potential need to conduct almost 60,000 wiretaps "simultaneously" (they define "simultaneous" to mean on the same day) by 10/25/98. (They do some handwaving to explain that while they're saying they might need to do 60K simultaneous wiretaps, they're not really saying they *would* do 60K wiretaps, but they're not promising not to, and really, who are we to question, anyway?) There's a discussion of their methodology and other bureaucratic poetry in the Federal Register (62 FR 1902, 1/14/97, try <http://w3.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/aaces002.html> and search volume 62 of the Federal Register for "calea") but the actual estimates (which are apparently broken down county-by-county) are only available from the FBI's Reading Room in Washington DC. Arrgh. (I got the 60K figure from the Murky News' wire service-to-Email gateway.) And Jamie Gorelick is resigning. -- Greg Broiles | US crypto export control policy in a nutshell: gbroiles@netbox.com | http://www.io.com/~gbroiles | Export jobs, not crypto. |