On May 15, 2014, at 4:54 PM, Hugh Flemington <[email protected]> wrote:
>  
> I’m curious about the freedom of coffee shops and airports to have open 
> internet access.  Don’t they have to meet the same sorts of standards as we 
> do?

In terms of CALEA at least, a college campus looks a lot more like an ISP than 
a typical coffee shop with a wifi router does. In the coffee shop case, 
presumably any CALEA requests would go to their upstream provider, who I assume 
could capture all the packets to or from that customer’s modem. 

Conversely, many campuses don’t have a simple single “upstream”, and the total 
volume of campus traffic may be Gigabits rather than the few tens of Megabits.

Educause provided a general document when CALEA was new, with suggestions for 
how a campus might be classified as a exempt or not. I found it on the Educause 
CALEA summary page ( http://www.educause.edu/library/calea ) in the main 
paragraph, which links to "Thinking Through the CALEA Exempt/Non-Exempt Issue” 
: http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/CSD4607.pdf

Based on the above, any local coffee shops I’ve encountered would be exempt, as 
they merely have a “commercial” cable or DSL account. A big airport with 
centrally provided open enterprise-class wireless might be a harder call, but 
it seems dependent on the details of their connection to their upstream, e.g. 
who owns the electronics at each end of their link.

Steve Bohrer
ITS, Bard College at Simon's Rock
413-528-7645

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