Since 1994?

I had no idea that CALEA has been around since 1994. Basically, it’s legislation that requires phone companies to allow law enforcement to easily tap any connections they carry, and allow them to even detect voicemail codes after a call is completed.

Now, there’s an update to that legislation that makes it apply to VoIP services as well. The difficult question is, of course, how can you ensure that calls can be tapped if they’re not going through a central server? One of the tricks to making VoIP work so well is that in a lot of cases it’s straight up P2P. New legislation means that’s not going to be legal.

And I’m not a fan of the government being able to tap anything, anytime, anyway.