Dear Susan, I feel privileged at being blog-worthy (to invoke a Seinfeldian notion). There isn't any intent to "smear." The allegation seems a little over the top. It's simply to convey a different perspective, and that it would be really nice for the K-Street community to worry a little more about the protection of infrastructure and users. (The K-Street rubric was simply a term of convenience.) [CALEA] clearly doesn't cover the internet or information services generally. My reading suggests that IP based platforms are clearly covered. Information services other than the narrow messaging exception in the CALEA definition are also covered. That's the way the Commission is reading it. That's how the House Telecommunications Subcommittee is reading it. My guess is that's how the appellate courts will read it as well. To do otherwise, pretty much guts the intent of the Act - which was to provide a continuing forensic capability to law enforcement as the technology evolved. The Commission's reading of CALEA imposes enormous burdens on a huge swathe of our nation's economy, with no legal justification. Nonsense. There are no huge burdens. The only study on record - which is in the proceeding and unrefuted - suggests the burden is a matter of millicents per subscriber per month. Like it was mentioned in the statement, the capabilities are already implemented in most major vendor products, and some even give the associated software programs away. The FCC has required a lot more in the way of infrastructure requirements. If Title I is your authority for CALEA, Title I is being stretched out of recognition. Title I imposes no specific requirements on anyone. It's being abused to provide a vessel for imposing former common-carrier regulations (like CALEA, E911, and USF) on the internet and internet applications, Much of the nations telecommunication infrastructure has been regulated under Title I for the past 70 years - certainly in the infrastructure protection and national security area. It will continue to be. ad hoc regulatory approach to the internet that has as its stated goal making the internet much more like a mobile phone network. You seem to impute some mystical set of properties to this abstraction you call The Internet. Maybe because Steve and I have been dealing with these technologies for the past 35 years that we just see it as pretty much the same basic protocols and network architectures, only with smarter devices hung off the periphery. Recall that those are computers in those cellphones. The regulatory approach is hardly ad hoc. You can identify most of the required capabilities as those imposed on public communication infrastructures worldwide for the past 150 years. TCP/IP is simply the latest ubiquitous middleware protocol. Congress never said it wanted this. The people never said they wanted this. I sat in a hearing on this subject a few months ago where in fact every congress person said they wanted this. Take a look at the current cybercrime statistics sometime and try and make the case for no forensic evidence. In other countries, the telephone system is often owned by the government, and the providers of telephony policies" like assistance to law enforcement and emergency services. When was the last time you were in another country? It's frankly a rather uninformed comment. In any case, the point was made to refute the incantation about CALEA damaging U.S. vendors and their ability to innovate in a global marketplace. Sorry, that argument doesn't wash. The rest of the world has even more stringent requirements - which is why the capabilities are already baked into most vendor's products. This statement reveals the battleground. It's not a safe and well-lit place. The terms of engagement appear to involve McCarthy-esque smears of lawyers and companies who dare to question the legitimacy of any act taken in the name of "security." The statute we're looking at -- Title I of the Communications Act -- has no details or limits that might protect against the depredations of law enforcement. And we're being out-manuvered by people who have a lot of time to spend in Geneva. As I said, this seems a little over the top...again. Articulating a different perspective doesn't equate to smearing. The Geneva remark is also uninformed. Almost none of these developments are occurring in Geneva. Lastly, I find Ben Reynolds reflections on anonymity to be worth substantial consideration. At the Georgia Tech Distinguished Lecture event a few weeks ago where I discussed this subject, one of the grad students persuaded me that limited resource useage could be a basis for anonymity. This would be analogous to using a car on a remote country road. --tony