In today's modern society, there is always a debate brewing on how the issues of privacy are dealt with in new technologies. For example, in the case of VoIP, there is a great deal of controversy going on regarding the legal aspects of the technology and how that affects the privacy of individuals and corporations that depend on VoIP as their primary mode of communication.
If we consider the existing United States wiretapping laws, the FBI already has the capability to conduct surveillance of broadband users through its DCS 1000 system (previously called Carnivore), via a court order.
However, as a comparatively new technology, an industry standard has not yet been completely employed, which means there is a lack of unification that will make it harder for Federal institutions to implement and regulate the use of VoIP.
Trope (2004, 10) proclaims that the problem stems from the fact that VoIP providers like Vonage, Time Warner Cable, Net2Phone, 8x8, and Deltathree do not adhere to the required standard. This further complicates federal surveillance. Therefore, the FBI has tried to remedy this issue by implementing a broad blanket solution so that they would be able to monitor all VoIP communications.
The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) which is a United States law, requires telecommunications services to revamp their networks to facilitate police and the FBI with guaranteed access to wiretaps. In addition to this, the legislation allowed the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to control what categories of companies were subject to this law. So far, only the traditional analog phone companies and mobile services have been subject to CALEA. However, given the power granted by the legislation to the FCC to regulate what categories of companies are subject to this law, it is foreseeable and possible that VoIP companies will soon be falling under this law.
The combination of 1964 federal wiretap laws (and its copious amount of amendments), along with CALEA, have put the FBI in a position to have the authority to wiretap all broadband services. Trope (2004, 10) thus states that if VoIP joins PSTN and mobile services as a subject to CALEA, it means that federal authorities are able to not only monitor the telephone calls made by VoIP, but also any data transmissions that are made over the broadband service. They could very well access any privileged information, confidential or business trade secrets, and sensitive medical information.
Some companies like MetaSwitch and Cisco Systems, Inc. have made their technologies CALEA compliant by providing FBI backdoor access to any VoIP transmissions. However, present technological limitations will still unavoidably lead to over-inclusive sweeps of data transmissions. Especially, when broadband providers cannot isolate specific VoIP calls between individual users, police are entitled to access the “full pipe”, meaning that the information belonging to thousands of other customers who are not under investigation would be made available to the police.
In addition to this, Coffee (2004, 69) states that he worries about the added friction in introducing new technologies: "Protocol improvements might be delayed by the need to update monitoring techniques". This kind of ambiguity is likely to stunt the growth of the mushrooming new technology.