Earlier this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed comments with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) objecting to the agency's plan to expand the reach of a law that forces communications service providers to build surveillance backdoors into their networks.
The Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), passed in 1994, forced telephone companies to redesign their network architectures to make wiretapping easier. It expressly did not regulate data traveling over the Internet. But earlier this year, law enforcement agencies petitioned the FCC to expand CALEA's reach to cover broadband providers so that it would be easier for law enforcement to tap Internet "phone calls" via Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) applications such as Vonage, as well as online "conversations" using various kinds of instant messaging (IM) programs like AOL Instant Messenger (AIM).
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