Newt's phone calls

[Greg Broiles]

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. 

--
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