A cheat sheet of the regulatory debates affecting how your VoIP calls are handled, the plans for 911, and how the government is listening in.
Paul D. Kretkowski on April 18th, 2007
As much as VoIP providers have relished the Wild West feel of the Internet, sheriffs are riding into town in the form of laws, FCC rules and taxes aimed at gradually taming VoIP. Here’s a rundown of the three debates affecting how VoIP providers handle service, the need to include 911 capability in it, and how open your calls are to federal wiretaps.
Network Neutrality
Network neutrality (or just “net neutrality”) is the idea that Internet nodes—servers or groups of servers that forward information sent via the Internet—should treat every IP packet they send or receive in the same way as every other packet.....
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2 comments:
Incidentally, CALEA is tricky. We're about to have to become CALEA-compliant at the large network provider for whom I work (who shall remain nameless).
I have CALEA training next month, but I can give you a breakdown of how we've been told it works.
We're required to buy a box... basically a device that plugs into the network that can analyze packets and record raw data. The box has a connection available for the feds. Should they call us and tell us they need a connection tapped (which I've heard from a friend who works at Sprint is a daily occurrence), they will give us an IP address on our network (or a name, although we've yet to understand how we're supposed to determine who's using what connection if they give us just a name), and we'll have to turn on the device. The feds get direct access to it, and we're responsible for setting the filters so that they only get access to the portions of the network they're supposed to have access to.
It's a huge legal mess, though, as some of the traffic we have on our net is from an international VoIP provider. Say we have to turn on monitoring for that provider... isn't recording calls of citizens from other countries a major breach of some sort of international law? Especially since these calls may just be between citizens of other countries, and the only part that resides in the US jurisdiction is the server.
It's liable to get us sued at the very least, but the way the CALEA is set up, there's no legal protection for us should we be required to follow the law. There's also no money alotted for us to set all this up, and the device for monitoring is costing us several hundred thousand. These sorts of things are just costs we're supposed to happily eat for the good of Uncle Sam.
You're absolutely right about the system being quite a mess. I think right now they're just scrambling for information, and the legal breaches will be taken in stride.
About: "they will give us an IP address on our network (or a name, although we've yet to understand how we're supposed to determine who's using what connection if they give us just a name)" ít'd be my guess they're using the IP adresses. Names just wouldn't cut it.
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