WASHINGTON—The Federal Communications Commission today is expected to reject the cellular industry’s request to indefinitely suspend the Sept. 30 deadline for meeting packet-data wiretap requirements, but a government source said the agency likely will give mobile phone carriers an additional two months to come into compliance.
The source said other electronic eavesdropping capabilities that industry and the FBI have fought over will be decided by the FCC by the end of the year.
The mobile phone industry in August petitioned the FCC for a blanket waiver of the packet-data wiretap requirement, arguing commercial technology is not available to develop a solution by Sept. 30 that separates header information from content in data communications.
The Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association has warned that letting the Sept. 30 deadline stand would be tantamount to making the FBI’s Carnivore—an e-mail sniffing investigative tool—the de facto packet data standard.
Today’s expected FCC ruling comes as the Bush administration and Congress push for legislation to relax wiretapping on phones and computers in the wake of last week’s terrorist attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The wiretap requirements flow from the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and the FCC’s implementation of the law. The FCC ruling, which included six of nine wiretap capabilities requested by the FCC, was challenged by wireless and wireline telecom carriers. The court vacated four wiretap capabilities sought by law enforcement and opposed by industry. Those four contested capabilities—as well as two FBI wiretap requirements not challenged by industry or privacy advocates—are expected to be settled by federal regulators in the next few months.
