North American Network Operators Group
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Re: ISP CALEA compliance

  • From: Albert Meyer
  • Date: Wed May 23 20:25:35 2007

Martin Hannigan wrote: 
I had mentioned that both VeriSign and Neustar have people that are
fluent in the
technical and general legal issues as well as the legal aspects. It
would seem to make more sense to solicit one of those organizations
since NANOG is about operations, and not politics. The EFF is a
political organization and these are not topics that make sense for
NANOG, IMHO, the list, the program, or  a BoF.

Having the EFF explain CALEA at NANOG is like asking the Sierra Club
to identify good
sites for oil wells in forests.

I took a look at EFF's CALEA FAQ at http://www.eff.org/Privacy/Surveillance/CALEA/?f=faq.html and they appear to have a pretty good handle on the technical issues. I can understand why VeriSign would prefer to leave EFF's viewpoint out of any discussion of CALEA, but I believe that VeriSign's perspective is just as political as EFF's. It's reasonable to think that VeriSign might employ people with better technical knowledge than EFF, but that doesn't mean that EFF's presentation would be less valuable than VeriSign's. Given their respective viewpoints (protecting individual rights and freedoms versus protecting corporate profits) maybe it would make sense to hear from both. Were EFF entirely clueless regarding the technical issues, I would agree that they should not be invited to NANOG, but that appears to not be the case.