The FBI has quietly requested that the FCC rule that Voice over IP (VoIP) services fall under CALEA (the federal statute that requires communications providers to provide the ability for the FBI to tap all calls).  This would require broadband and VoIP providers to reengineer their networks to allow this kind of surveillance.

Representatives of the FBI’s Electronic Surveillance Technology Section in Chantilly, Va., have met at least twice in the past three weeks with senior officials of the Federal Communications Commission to lobby for proposed new Internet eavesdropping rules. The FBI-drafted plan seeks to force broadband providers to provide more efficient, standardized surveillance facilities and could substantially change the way that cable modem and DSL (digital subscriber line) companies operate.

The new rules are necessary, because terrorists could otherwise frustrate legitimate wiretaps by placing phone calls over the Internet, warns a summary of a July 10 meeting with the FCC that the FBI prepared. “Broadband networks may ultimately replace narrowband networks,” the summary says. “This trend offers increasing opportunities for terrorists, spies and criminals to evade lawful electronic surveillance.”

In the last year, Internet telephony (also called voice over Internet Protocol, or VOIP) has grown increasingly popular among consumers and businesses with high-speed connections. Flat-rate plans cost between $20 and $40 a month for unlimited local and long-distance calls. One of the smaller VOIP providers, Vonage, recently said it has about 34,000 customers and expects to have 1 million by late 2004.

According to the proposal that the FCC is considering, any company offering cable modem or DSL service to residences or businesses would be required to comply with a thicket of federal regulations that would establish a central hub for police surveillance of their customers. The proposal has alarmed civil libertarians who fear that it might jeopardize privacy and warn that the existence of such hubs could facilitate broad surveillance of other Internet communications such as e-mail, Web browsing and instant messaging.

The FBI also contends that if the providers can’t provide access to individual users’ data streams that they must be given access to the whole pipe.

The FBI appears to have first presented its proposal to the FCC last year. But in the July 10 and July 22 meetings, the bureau extended it to say that if broadband providers cannot isolate specific VOIP calls to and from individual users, they must give police access to the “full pipe”—which, by including the complete simultaneous communications of hundreds or thousands of customers, could raise substantial privacy concerns.

A summary of the meeting prepared by the FBI said the FCC could “require carriers to make the full pipe available and leave law enforcement to perform the required minimization. This approach is already used when ISPs provide non-CALEA technical assistance for lawfully ordered electronic surveillance.”

I tend to have an instinctive reaction against giving such broad capability to any law enforcement agency, and I also have an instinctive distrust of the FBI given the serious problems that they have yet to address.  My anarchist tendencies tell me that this would open up a market for an anonymous peer-to-peer VoIP program that included strong encryption.  Let the FBI tap all they want, but (so far) there’s nothing that says what we’re sending back and forth has to be readable.