As an engineer who worked with Eastlink a few years back, I can say with 100% certainty that the RCMP monitor every fucking packet that traverses Eastlink's network. I know because I assisted in the installation of the RCMP's "blackbox" that sits on the inside perimeter of Eastlink's boarder routers. Big Brother HAS ALWAYS been watching, folks.
Yes, but you're neglecting to explain why they want/need them.
Prior to IP phones, the feds would get their court order, go directly to the targets residence, and put their recording device on the pedestal outside to record their analog call directly. They didn't even need to contact the phone company.
Then, along came digital. Now the traffic at the pedestal is white noise. They go to the phone company to ask them to record the call... the phone company would look in the documentation for their Softswitch and say "FBI phone tap isn't a checkbox we have..."
So what are the feds to do? Well, they just stick your typical Packet Analyzer on the network (thats what that blackbox is) and then somehow flag the traffic they want to get. I'm not sure how they flag it... I suspect they do something to the targets phone. About 5yrs ago I handled the CALEA requests for a telco and I never saw anything relating to those boxes, so whatever it is they do, it doesn't have anything to do with the phone company.
The one thing I do know is that those boxes (carnivore) cannot be recording all calls. There's just too much traffic for a rack-mount box to be able to gather all of it, or even decode a good portion of it to find interesting bits.
I think that what the telcos are saying here is "Don't make us do anymore of this carnivore stuff... the softswitch stuff is improving and in the near future it'll be just as easy to record as the old analog lines were. Maybe even easier!"
I'm not arguing for or against it... I'm a pretty big privacy advocate... but it's not nearly as black and white as you're making it seem.
