At 12:06 AM -0400 6/20/04, Sean Donelan wrote:
On Sat, 19 Jun 2004, John Curran wrote:
S.2281 takes the middle of the road position in areas such as lawful intercept, universal service fund, and E911. At a high-level, those VoIP services which offer PSTN interconnection (and thereby look like traditional phone service in terms of capabilities) under S.2281 pick up the same regulatory requirements.
It sounds good, if you assume there will always be a PSTN. But its like defining the Internet in terms of connecting to the ARPANET.
Correct. It's a workable interim measure to continue today's practice while the edge network is transitioning to VoIP. It does not address the more colorful long-term situation that law enforcement will be in shortly with abundant, ad-hoc, encrypted p2p communications.
What about Nextel's phone-to-phone talk feature which doesn't touch the PSTN? What about carriers who offer "Free" on-net calling, which doesn't connect to the PSTN and off-net calling to customers on the PSTN or other carriers.
Will the bad guys follow the law, and only conduct their criminal activities over services connected to the PSTN?
Sean - what alternative position do you propose? /John