The Federal Bureau of Investigation earlier this month responded to Sen. Patrick Leahy’s (D-Vt.) request for key data on digital wiretap implementation. The 13-page document explains the methodology behind calculating capacity requirements for wiretapping and currently is being reviewed by the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association.
Determining carriers’ capacity requirements addresses one provision in the implementation of the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act charted by Leahy. CTIA said it anticipated rules and procedures on costs for recovery, a separate provision under CALEA, would be issued in the Federal Register last Friday. The provision addresses reimbursement procedures.
CTIA indicated initial discontent that the capacity requirements are expressed in percentages, as opposed to whole numbers. CTIA spokesman Tim Ayers said the group and some of its members fear the FBI will ask carriers to dedicate an unnecessary amount of ports to law enforcement. These ports require ongoing maintenance, which is expensive, and “in effect those lines can’t be used for any other purposes,” Ayers added.
The FBI said capacity requirements were figured in percentages to offer carriers’ flexibility in network size increases or decreases and for new service providers, new switches, new services and new technologies.
Ayers said the FBI is scheduled to issue an interim notice on capacity requirements to interested parties by the middle of March, after which CTIA and carriers would submit comments. CTIA expects the notice will contain similar information as the document submitted to Leahy.
Law enforcement collected data on line interceptions between January 1993 and March 1995 to anticipate capacity needs for future line interceptions. County boundaries were used as the common reference for analyzing future capacity needs.
Three basic categories were defined. Category I is a small number of urban areas where line interceptions are the highest. The second category also includes a small number of geographic areas, some urban and some suburban. Category III includes the majority of areas, suburban and rural, where electronic surveillance has been low or nonexistent in the past.
Determining the boundaries for each category, law enforcement researched to find the highest incidence of simultaneous line interceptions in one switch, which was 220. This was unusually high, said the FBI, so the second highest number, 120 was used as the marked high for category I.
