Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Justice wants CALEA re-examined in light of VoIP

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 17 Jun 2004 14:12:27 -0400

Justice wants CALEA re-examined in light of VoIP
By Heather Forsgren Weaver
June 17 13:32:00, 2004

WASHINGTON—The Department of Justice would like Congress to re-examine
the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement
Act of 1994 but cannot say why revisions are needed, according to
testimony delivered Wednesday at a hearing on Voice over
Internet Protocol held by the Senate Commerce Committee.

“We feel it needs to be re-examined given all of these new
technologies,” said Laura Parsky, deputy assistant attorney general of
the
criminal division of the Justice Department.

Under tough questioning by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Parsky was unable to
provide a reason for wanting to change CALEA and
especially to include VoIP technologies.

“You have to convince us that you need this,” said Wyden. “We need
specific examples of what you cannot do now and where the
law falls short. … You are looking for a remedy for a problem that you
cannot identify.”

A civil libertarian critical of DoJ’s implementation of CALEA said DoJ
and the FBI don’t want to have to go to various places to obtain
wiretap information because they liked it when Ma Bell was the only
telephone company.

“Thirty years ago life was simple. There was Ma Bell. There was one-stop
shopping. It was very easy for law enforcement. They got
everything from one place, one switch, one system and this Congress
decided as a matter of public policy that we needed a different
approach. We needed competition. We needed innovation,” said James
Dempsey, executive director of the Center for Democracy &
Technology. “Law enforcement keeps up with this technology but they are
going to have to go to different places to find the different
pieces of information. We have broken up this network. To try to put
that network back together in a single intercept point that gives
everything they want in a neat tied-up package—I don’t think that is a
feasible policy objective, and it is inconsistent with other
objectives.”

Dempsey used cell phones as an example of law enforcement keeping up
with technology. “Everyone has a cell phone, they have an
e-mail account, they have a wireline home phone number. That is life. We
have reaped huge benefits from it. The fact is the
terrorists and drug dealers have not found a haven. Eighty percent of
the interceptions last year were on cell phones. The criminal
who thinks that they may be getting something by having cell phones and
walking around is cooking his own goose,” he said.
http://rcrnews.com/cgi-bin/news.pl?newsId=18527

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