April 25, 2000

Re: CALEA Section 103 Compliance and Section 107(c) Petitions, CC Docket No. 97-213 (rel. April 25, 2000)

I concur in the Commission's decision to facilitate extensions of time for deployment of CALEA compliant equipment. However, I would have gone further by granting a blanket extension of time to permit carrier compliance.

There is no question that rapid deployment of CALEA-compliant equipment is required under the statute and important to the law enforcement community. Nonetheless, the concerns I raised two years ago remain today, the FCC has great difficulty predicting with any precision when compliance with these obligations will become possible.⁽¹⁾ Similarly, just as two years ago, advocates of the individual waiver approach argue it is necessary to put carriers "feet to the fire" and "send a signal." I remain skeptical of sending signals, particularly those that have little, if any, impact. In many cases, CALEA compliance is simply beyond the control of carriers. Carriers cannot control when manufacturers produce this equipment; nor do they have complete control over manufacturers' installment schedules. The statute seems to recognize this inherent limitation; the Commission is permitted to grant extensions if "compliance. . .is not reasonably achievable through application of technology available within the compliance period."⁽²⁾ That statutory standard seems to be satisfied in this case.

Rather than requiring thousands of individualized showings about deployment dates and equipment availability, I believe the far more prudent approach would have been to grant a blanket extension of time. The delays in deployment are not the result of individual carriers' situations. If they were, individual petitions may have been the preferred approach. Here, the problems are industry-wide and manufacturer-specific. Thus, in my view, the solution should be industry-wide and/or manufacturer-specific. Instead, we have adopted an individualized approach to a group problem. Unfortunately, the individualized approach will also require showings by thousands of individual carriers and FCC assessments of thousands of individual petitions. In my view, this imposes an unnecessary burden on carriers, particularly small and rural providers. Despite the efforts in the Notice, these determinations will consume significant carrier resources to develop CALEA-compliant equipment deployment schedules that will inherently be fraught with imprecision. As for the Commission, we too will expend significant resources that could be better deployed on a host of other activities. In the end, I believe carriers, law enforcement, the Commission, and the public would be better served by a blanket extension. Fewer resources spent on thousands of redundant paper filings mean more resources spent on obtaining compliance.⁽³⁾