Reasonably Available Information

Operators are only required to provide information to law enforcement if it is reasonably available. For example, “call-identifying information is reasonably available to a carrier if it is present at an intercept access point and can be made available without the carrier being unduly burdened with network modifications”.

The EU statute is similar in identifying when information is technically feasible and economically feasible available.

Thus Call Forwarding Information might not always be reasonably available in a SIP environment - since the call forwarding could happen outside the control of a given operator.

Similarly Dialed-Digit Extraction might not be available in a SIP environment since the actual IP address of the source and destination might be inside encrypted SDP

Transcript

[slide389] Now, between the U.S. and the EU, there's a big difference. In the U.S., you're required to provide this information to law enforcement if they present a warrant. But in the EU, the rule is it has to be both technically feasible to do and economically feasible to do. Whereas the U.S. only requires technical feasibility. If you can provide this information, you have to provide it. The EU says it has to be technically feasible and economically feasible. So in Sweden, has anyone noticed why there's a charge whenever you make a voiceover IP call? There's always an initial charge. Why is that? Even if you have unlimited numbers of minutes of talk time by your voice over IP provider, why did they charge an opening fee? Because they're trying to ensure that there is an economic reason why they can collect that data of who you're calling. Because if they didn't charge you a fee for that, do they need to collect the information? No. So the regulator said, you must charge this fee, so you have a reason, and therefore, what happens? The police can come later and say, we want the records of who called who. An interesting feature. Of course, with call forwarding, you might not actually know who they're calling. You might simply see a relay that they're calling through. You might even have digit extraction, so I go to the relay, and there I provide the relay the information about who I really want to contact. In which case, the service provider might not be able to provide the information of who you talk to at all.