WASHINGTON-The Federal Communications Commission appears poised to extend the compliance date for the digital telephony wiretap act until the end of this century. This extension gets law enforcement off the back of the telecommunications industry but does not bode well for a permanent solution.
The problem is that although telecom carriers will not be subject to $10,000 per day fines come Oct. 25, the extension is too short to implement the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994. The telecom industry, privacy advocates, the FBI and the Justice Department continue to battle over CALEA’s implementation, and this extension just portends of more battles to come.
Since 1994, industry, privacy advocates and law enforcement have had public spats in Congress, at an industry standards-setting body, during comments on the FBI capacity requirements, and most recently, at the FCC as the agency tries to determine whether the industry interim standard is deficient, as the FBI claims; too much, as privacy advocates claim; or just right, as the telecom industry says.
The FCC is not expected to issue a proposed standard for CALEA implementation until at least September giving the industry less than a year to implement the final product after the proposal is sent out for comment and finalized. Manufacturers consistently have said it would take at least 18 months to deploy any standard. “Clearly [there] is not enough [time. Manufacturers] cannot start building equipment [until they have a standard],” said Alyson V. Ziegler, director and counsel for government relations at the United States Telephone Association.
This time frame may upset key lawmakers. Two of them, Reps. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) and John Conyers (D-Ga.), the leadership of the House Committee on the Judiciary, sent a letter last month to FCC Chairman William Kennard urging the FCC to grant a two-year extension with a direction that manufacturers be told to begin building CALEA-compliant solutions and equipment based on the industry standard.
Ziegler added that the telecom industry has been privately assured the FCC will reconsider the time frame after the standard is finalized, but such assurances are not expected to be in the actual extension document adopted by the FCC. Without these formal assurances, Ziegler said there may be an industry push to get Congress to extend the date to two years after there is a standard. A similar extension, pushing back the compliance date to Oct. 1, 2000, was passed by the House of Representatives as part of the Department of Justice reauthorization bill on June 22.
The Senate, however, is not expected to take up the DOJ reauthorization bill this year. If the Senate does consider the DOJ reauthorization, it will have to answer the strong opposition of Attorney General Janet Reno, who sent a letter to Vice President Al Gore (in his role as President of the Senate) urging the CALEA language be dropped from DOJ authorization. “There is no need to tamper with the carefully negotiated balance created by CALEA,” Reno said in the letter dated July 30.
