Back in May 2006, you will recall, the FCC issued an order saying that facilities-based broadband Internet access providers and providers of interconnected VoIP services were subject to CALEA.  A legal challenge to FCC's statutory acumen had been filed, but (inexplicably) failed in June 2006.  (FCC apparently read CALEA while standing on its collective head -- many posts on that here.)

The deadline for compliance is May 14, 2007, but no one knows what compliance means.

I've seen messages from the askcalea.net industry forum (access to which is controlled by the FBI) that indicate that some vendors of "trusted third party" compliance services think that all providers have to work through them -- and some think that merely capturing packets and sending them to law enforcement will fulfill the statute's requirements.

Okay, so this may seem like narrow inside baseball, but it's not.  If law enforcement isn't content with a stream of packets, but instead forces small providers and VoIP companies to work through third-party vendors, that's a big cost-shifting exercise.  The big guys are fine with this, I'm sure.  So are the vendors. 

The Act does say that the government is not authorized to require "any specific design of equipment, facilities, services, features, or system configurations to be adopted by any provider ..." and is not authorized "to prohibit the adoption of any equipment, facility, service, or feature by any provider ...".  But it's all up in the air.