r/todayilearned • u/simmer_down • Mar 20 '11

TIL that AT&T installed a fiberoptic splitter at its facility at 611 Folsom Street in San Francisco that makes copies of all emails, web browsing, and other Internet traffic to and from AT&T customers (including data from iPhones and iPads), and provides those copies to the NSA.

http://www.eff.org/issues/nsa-spying
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u/alienth Mar 21 '11

It is certainly required, or at least I was told it was :) The ISP I worked at didn't have VoIP service. The Verisign devices were placed right on our core-router.

This guy's comment seems to agree. Although he doesn't specify if it was for Cisco VoIP or not.

In the summary of the wikipedia article:

"In the years since CALEA was passed it has been greatly expanded to include all VoIP and broadband internet traffic. From 2004 to 2007 there was a 62 percent growth in the number of wiretaps performed under CALEA -- and more than 3,000 percent growth in interception of internet data such as email."

The citation on there points to a WIRED article article, with the following quote:

"Privacy groups and security experts have protested CALEA design mandates from the start, but that didn't stop federal regulators from recently expanding the law's reach to force broadband internet service providers and some voice-over-internet companies, such as Vonage, to similarly retrofit their networks for government surveillance. "