WASHINGTON-Come Monday, March 12, wireless carriers may be facing fines of up to $10,000 per day if they cannot meet wiretap capacity requirements and did not previously warn the government of the possibility of missing the deadline.
After March 12, “any law enforcement agency requesting capacity-and being denied capacity on any switch installed after Sept. 8, 1998 or any switch for which a carrier statement was not filed-may seek an enforcement action against the carrier,” said H. Michael Warren of TeLEA Consulting, noting the enforcement action could be as high as $10,000 per day. Warren is a former FBI agent who once ran the FBI’s CALEA program. CALEA stands for the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994.
Carriers are likely to be caught holding the bag, and perhaps paying big bucks. A call to the Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association revealed there is a misconception about the March 12 deadline. CTIA believes law enforcement cannot enforce the capacity deadline because it cannot enforce the compliance rules.
“Capacity goes hand-in-hand with compliance,” said Michael Altschul, CTIA senior vice president for policy and administration.
“Not true,” said Warren. “If you look at [CALEA], it specifically refers to capacity.”
The confusion may be that many people refer to CALEA as the digital wiretap act. But, Warren said FBI agents have had a difficult time getting capacity on wireless networks even in an analog environment.
“It is going to be a much more difficult problem for wireless carriers. … The agents have been fighting the capacity wars for years. They have been waiting in line for capacity on wireless switches,” said Warren.
If carriers are not ready for the capacity deadline, they are even less ready for the compliance deadline at the end of the month. In this they may have found an ally in the FBI.
“The purpose of this letter is to recommend to the Federal Communications Commission that the preliminary determination period for petitions under [CALEA] be extended until Sept. 30 for wireless telecommunications carriers. The [FBI] CALEA Implementation Section makes this recommendation based on the need for additional time to complete the process,” said Leslie M. Szwajkowski, CIS unit chief, in a letter to Thomas J. Sugrue, chief of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau.
CTIA also agreed to this extension.
This deadline is for the industry interim standard. There is even more controversy over additional capabilities known as the punch list. The deadline for compliance with the punch list is Sept. 30, but the industry believes the date will have to be extended because the FCC has not yet ruled on what punch-list capabilities are required under CALEA.
The FBI had urged the FCC to require the telecommunications industry to add nine capabilities to the industry interim standard but the FCC chose to include only six. Four of these capabilities were later challenged by the telecom industry and privacy advocates.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed with industry that the four capabilities cost too much and raised privacy red flags. It sent the capabilities back to the FCC.
Recently, the standards body put on hold any standards development awaiting action from the FCC. Standards development is step one in a software-development process the industry has consistently said would take 18 months to two years.
