Mark Koskenmaki wrote:
Law? Hell, no. It's the FCC's wishes. And we're discussing how stupid
the whole damn thing is as well. And here you are defending it. You wonder
why I'm in a "pissy mood"???
It's indirectly a law - the FCC is granted broad powers under current
law to request things like this. If you think the FCC's authority goes
too far, you're welcome to that opinion (and to try to change others'
minds on the subject, though it doesn't seem like you've had much luck
so far).
Given that the FCC gives us access to a truckload of unlicensed spectrum
and, so far, only asks me to fill out a ten-minute form twice a year, I
think it's a darn good bargain.
$1 and 1 minute is TOO MUCH OBLIGATION. Sorry. Anyone who thinks we OWE
them anything for our existence is cracked. THEY OWE US GRATITUDE FOR DOING
THE COUNTRY"S WORK!!!! And they owe us a check for doing work for them.
THAT's NOT RADICAL, that's nothing other than CIVICS 101!
Maybe we went to different schools. Mine had a bunch of classes on how
everyone is responsible for "doing their part" in a participatory
democracy. (I know, this is technically a representative republic, but
bear with me here.) You pay some property taxes, you get to use all
those roads they built. The government doesn't give you stuff for free,
you don't give them stuff for free. It's all trade-offs. Basic
freshman-year-of-college economics. A few minutes to fill out a form is
a pretty darn good price for everything we get from the FCC.
So, we can argue and advocate to the FCC about rules changes and
implementations about RF issues, but God forbid we should tell them that
CALEA is out of line? It is STILL their ruling and opinions, which is the
sole reason we're issued network mandates.
To be blunt, your opinion is (apparently) in the minority. If you think
CALEA goes too far, I don't think anyone is preventing you from making
FCC filings to that effect.
I am not advocating "flaunting the law", for pity's sakes. I am just
eternally vigilant and VERY defensive of my rights and freedoms as a citizen
and businessman. Instead, we should have been ADAMANTLY and repeatedly
saying in forceful language, THIS IS NOT UNIVERSALLY POSSIBLE, and then
asking the industry what ways they can be accommodated- and educating them,
NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND - them telling us how our networks have to work.
While I'm sure the statement "this is not universally possible" is
technically correct (the best kind of correct!) I believe you're
seriously over-estimating the difficulty. I'd wager most of us already
have, somewhere in our network, a decent managed switch that can be
configured to spit out the requested data. Feed said data into a cheap
PC with a big hard drive (another thing that most of us already have),
filter out the specific bits the government wants, spit it out. If this
takes more than a couple hours to set up, there's something seriously
weird going on with your network.
David Smith
MVN.net
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