Wiretapping takes on a whole new meaning now that phone calls are being made over the Internet, posing legal and technical hurdles for the FBI

Wiretapping takes on a whole new meaning now that phone calls are being made over the Internet, posing legal and technical hurdles for the FBI as it seeks to prevent the emerging services from becoming a safe haven for criminals and terrorists. The FBI wants regulators to affirm that such services fall under a 1994 law requiring phone companies to build in surveillance capabilities. It is also pushing the industry to create technical standards to make wiretapping easier and cheaper. But privacy advocates fear that because online eavesdropping technology is crude, tapping into the data stream for voice means getting more than what a court ordered — including possibly e-mail and other digital communications. Service operators also question who should pay. The increasingly popular "Voice over Internet Protocol," or VoIP, technology breaks phone conversations into data packets, sends them over the Internet and reassembles them at the destination. The technology creates gray areas in applying the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. That law required that then-emerging digital phone technologies, which are more difficult to wiretap than analog circuits, be designed so authorities could monitor them.