A number of laws have been passed in recent decades governing the wiretapping and interception of conversations on the Public Switching and Telecommunications Network and the Internet. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) passed in 1994 requires that digitally switched telephone networks be designed and built with wiretap capabilities and that service providers assist law enforcement agencies (LEA) in obtaining the desired surveillance. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) in 2005 ruled that the CALEA also applies to Voice over IP (VoIP) conversations. This initially generated considerable contention among the Internet community regarding the extent to which wiretapping should be embedded into the applicable Internet protocols. The International Engineering Task Force (IETF) has provided general guidelines in RFC 3924 regarding architecture for the interception and availability of the information to the LEAs but has declined to produce a full-fledged standard. The guidelines proposed by the IETF were heavily influenced by Internet Service Provider (ISP) component manufactures and define a generic architecture based on the functionality of major components. These components are defined in such a manner as to properly configure network devices for the required intercept, limiting access to the information, and passing the intercepted information to the designated LEA. The IETF guidelines define the functional boundaries and communication between the ISP components and the LEA.
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