[IP] FCC order on VOIP snooping

[John Morris]

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 <rlrevell at joe-job.com>
>Date: May 6, 2006 11:40:09 AM EDT
>To: David Farber <dave at farber.net>
>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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