As of January 26, the FBI was still negotiating, and had no finalized cooperative agreements. The Committees asked for timelines for compliance. Another, Siemens, will not be able to deploy solutions until the first quarter of the year 2000, and will have to proceed in phases stretching into the following year. Nortel will have part of its solution ready by the third quarter of 1998, but the second phase will have to wait until the second quarter of the year 2000. The only company that will promise on the public record to have a solution ready by the third quarter of 1998 is Bell Emergis, and that solution appears to be speculative at best.
Compliance is snarled in controversy.
The capacity numbers the FBI was supposed to issue in October 1995 still are not final. The industry standards process to define surveillance capabilities has been derailed by the FBI's heavy-handedness. Then of course, there's Switzerland, where the Sonntags Zeitung newspaper recently reported that Swiss police can track the whereabouts of mobile phone users via a telephone company computer that records billions of movements going back more than half a year. Subscribe to the CDT Policy Post news distribution list. CDT Policy Posts, the regular news publication of the Center For Democracy and Technology, are received by more than 13,000 Internet users, industry leaders, policy makers and activists, and have become the leading source for information about critical free speech and privacy issues affecting the Internet and other interactive communications media.