more on FCC order on VOIP snooping

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: John Morris <jmorris-lists () cdt org>
Date: May 7, 2006 1:05:42 AM EDT
To: dave () farber net, Lee Revell <rlrevell () joe-job com>
Subject: 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 <rlrevell () joe-job com>
> Date: May 6, 2006 11:40:09 AM EDT
> To: David Farber <dave () 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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