Government hears from all sides in lawful access debate at first parlay

The federal government has held its first meeting with several key players affected by lawful access matters. But finding consensus among parties with disparate aims proved difficult, due to time constraints and differences in philosophy. The session had already been delayed once because bureaucrats in the government had been shuffled out of their jobs and their replacements had to be brought up to speed (NL, Dec. 8/03). On December 16, the departments of Justice, Solicitor-General and Industry met with telcos, police, and industry groups such as the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association, the Canadian Association of Internet Providers, and the Canadian Cable Television Association. Only one topic raised its head at the first meeting. "It was just about the issue of cost recovery. They put out a discussion paper about a week before the meeting, which didn’t really give us a lot of time to arrive at any firm positions, so we didn’t really come out with very many firm positions," David Elder, assistant general counsel, regulatory law at Bell Canada, tells Network Letter. "Government was attempting to get a better handle on the issues and where there really are disputes and what the nature of the dispute was." The paper broke the concerns down into three parts: look-up, hook-up, and haulback. Look-up is the provision of subscriber information such as customer name and address (CNA) or local service provider identification (LPSID) to legal agencies by telcos. Hook-up is the provision of services that permit police to wiretap individual phones. Haulback refers to the transportation of the intercepted communications from telcos’ facilities to police monitoring sites.Of prime concern to the telcos is who pays for the services. In 1996, the CRTC granted Bell a tariff for the provision of CNA data to legal authorities. Yet four years later, it denied Telus Corp. a similar tariff under Telecom Order 2000-676. "Consequently, Telus continued to bill law enforcement agencies for this assistance," the discussion paper states. "Consistent with their position prior to the March 1999 public hearing, Edmonton and Calgary continue to maintain that they are not required to make these payments." Elder says it is not inexpensive to provide this service to the police."Bell employs a number of people just to be able to do this. Their sole function is to liaise with law enforcement and to effect wiretaps and to do searches and all that sort of stuff," he explains. "We’ve had to develop processes and software so we would like some sort of compensation and law enforcement is basically saying their budgets keep getting cut and they don’t disagree we should be compensated but they shouldn’t have to do it." No firm date has been set for future meetings. Elder speculates that the meetings in the New Year will be smaller. Many of the telcos are reluctant to discuss sensitive customer information in the presence of competitors or outside agencies, he notes.

Government hears from all sides in lawful access debate at first parlay

News | 12/22/2003 5:00 am EST

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