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                                               April 25, 2000
  
  
   CONCURRING STATEMENT OF COMMISSIONER HAROLD FURCHTGOTT-
                             ROTH
            
  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. 
  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."   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.