New technology companies that offer voice services may soon have to comply with technical specifications set by the FBI to make digital signals easy to intercept.
It is unclear what the FBI’s technical design mandates would be and how they would affect Internet service providers and others. But a local nonprofit has invested more than five years in working with the FBI to make cable companies and their digital phone networks compliant with federal laws covering wiretapping.
Louisville-based CableLabs, a nonprofit research-development consortium formed by the cable industry in 1988, finalized its specifications in 2004. Those specifications, which guide manufacturers, are detailed, written descriptions of how to build equipment, such as cable modems, used to provide digital telephone service.
“It wasn’t pressure but an acknowledgment that telephone service is being carried via a new technology,” said CableLabs president and chief executive Richard Green. “What they (the FBI) really were looking for was to get the same information they were entitled to on any telephone service.”
Green said intercepting and gathering traffic over a digital voice line is more complex than on a traditional phone, or analog, line. One difference is that digital information is carried in encrypted packets.
“To get the information that’s required by the law, you have to be able to recognize and sift out the right packets,” Green said. “The technology has to be focused very specifically. The reason for that is to protect people’s privacy.”
CableLabs was adhering to the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, which requires companies to make it easy for law enforcement to tap telephone lines. Last year, the Federal Communications Commission extended the law to apply to broadband companies by early 2007.
Comcast, the nation’s largest cable provider, was among the cable providers working with CableLabs on the new specifications. Philadelphia-based Comcast began rolling out its Digital Voice telephone service in 2005. The service was made available to its 700,000 Colorado subscribers in November.
Earlier this month, Comcast president and chief executive Brian Roberts said the company has 1.3 million Digital Voice subscribers and expects that number to exceed 2 million by the end of this year.
But subscribers to digital voice services from cable companies shouldn’t worry about their calls being monitored, said John Morris, general counsel for the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonprofit civil-liberties group in Washington, D.C.
“It doesn’t make the cable subscriber any more or less worse off” as far as eavesdropping goes, he said.
“Every company in the United States is obligated to comply with a court-ordered interception,” he said. “Cable companies are not doing anything to give more away to the government.”
Staff writer Kimberly S. Johnson can be reached at 303-820-1088 or kjohnson@denverpost.com.
