The trouble is rooted in the rapidly emerging tendency of telephone companies to put regular telephone traffic on low-cost Internet links instead of traditional phone networks. In traditional phone networks, information about the origin and destination of a call is sent separately from the call itself. That is not the case with packets of data sent on the Internet. They contain both address information and the content of the call. Thus, investigators who want to trace only the origin and destination of calls would have access to the entire phone conversation.
Federal law requires judges to authorize requests to trace calls on demand.
But full-blown wiretaps that monitor actual conversations require police to show probable cause for concern before judges grant authorization. The CDT and Electronic Frontier Foundation are expected to ask the Federal Communications Commission to intervene to keep the FBI from implementing its plan. Separately, the American Civil Liberties Union is expected to attack the plan on similar grounds, plus at least a half dozen other areas in which the ACLU believes the law deficient. FBI officials said critics have it backward. If new technology threatens privacy, telecom and Internet companies may have to rethink which technologies they implement instead of looking to the FBI for answers.