It's worth noting that I got dragged into this project when the District Court ruled that "information service providers" were subject to regulation under CALEA. This kicked off a huge project to bring the IP network into compliance.
It's not a stretch to imagine an situation where a company decides to fight and loses, thus looping in a huge number of companies that might imagine that they aren't telecom providers, but a court decides they are.
There is a very fine line between SMS and iMessage. Apple provides servers that store and forward messages, and it'd be hard to argue with a straight face that a court should "think different" when comparing AT&T and Apple. Judges aren't dumb and they will pay close attention to the "substance test" when deciding if a company is providing a "telecommunications service" in a ruling.
So then, how long before there is an open-source, distributed key management system, that lets you store public keys of all your friends' phones, and end encrypted texts/etc with them, and which acts basically as only a key exchange service?
... I guess CALEA could be made to force them to MITM anyone doing key exchanges. Damn.
It's not a stretch to imagine an situation where a company decides to fight and loses, thus looping in a huge number of companies that might imagine that they aren't telecom providers, but a court decides they are.
There is a very fine line between SMS and iMessage. Apple provides servers that store and forward messages, and it'd be hard to argue with a straight face that a court should "think different" when comparing AT&T and Apple. Judges aren't dumb and they will pay close attention to the "substance test" when deciding if a company is providing a "telecommunications service" in a ruling.