This article, by Wired’s Ryan Singel details the FBI’s wiretapping capabilities with DCSNet, a communications surveillance network built under CALEA that sounds like it might have been advertised with the slogan, “Be the envy of other major governments”. The salient points:

- The FBI has extremely wideranging wiretapping facilities that let it log into a provider’s network; the provider turns on the tap once it receives a court order

- It’s having trouble with Skype, because there’s no central point to tap

- These digital wiretaps are more expensive than the traditional physical kind (by nearly a factor of ten) and processing the data is also considerably more expensive (all of which we taxpayers get to pay for)

- There are significant security holes inside DCSNet itself, many of which were spotted in its predecessor system, Carnivore.

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