Presence and IntComm WG

["E. Michael Staman" <>]

 

All –

 

As some of you know, I’ve been lurking on this list since the days before the working group’s initial formation a few years ago. 

 

In the ICS working group the CALEA-compliance issue is currently a hot topic – how to respond to the planned ruling that all of higher education install  standardized equipment (buy CALEA compliant switches and routers) to facilitate law enforcement’s  wiretaps of IP networks. CALEA compliant equipment allows them to tap from a remote location after having obtained and served a warrant to the equipment owners (in this case the campus). Under the original CALEA we were exempt from having CALEA compliant telephone equipment because we were considered a private network and private networks were exempt.  This is apparently no longer going to be the case, although there will be appeals to the courts which might reverse things.   The discussion ranges from “this is a simple software fix” on the part of some, to “this is an $18.5 million dollar problem” on the part of a highly respected Big-10 university.

 

Here is my question.  If I understand the approximately 10% of the mail that I’ve been able to read on the list, then the concept of presence makes CALEA compliance a  practical  impossibility.  Specifically, the problem would be insoluble because, in the SIP space there is no technology which, even when alerted, could "listen" to a SIP call from remote site "A" to remote site "B."   That is, since there is no way to predict the future location of a voice or other type of call by a bad guy, it becomes physically impossible for justice to identify a location to tap because, unlike the cellular infrastructure, there are no hooks to listen remotely even though sufficient data is probably available via the registration process to actually identify a target when a communication is initiated.  It can’t be done, short of insisting that every institution of higher education install a yet-to-be-developed capability to capture streams of bits remotely from another institution, and further requiring every other institution to permit them both to do so and to install the necessary hooks to make it possible – apparently in the 8-figure range in some cases.

 

Or perhaps I misunderstand – possibly completely.  Can anybody comment on the above questions?

 

Thanks.

 

  -- Mike

 

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E. Michael Staman

Peyton Anderson Professor in Information Technology

Macon State College

100 College Station Drive, Macon, GA 31206-5144

478-757-3661