The words of the obligation, in plain English.

Court-authorized monitoring of a named subscriber's communications as they happen. Depending on the order it captures call-identifying information (who called whom, when, for how long) or, under a full-content order, the content of calls and Internet sessions. The intercept is provisioned against one target, delivered to the agency named in the order, and switched off at the order's termination date. It is the capability CALEA requires a carrier to have ready.

The broader term: a government's ability, with valid legal process, to obtain communications or the data around them. Lawful intercept is lawful access to real-time communications; records production is lawful access to stored records; the phrase is also used in policy debates about encrypted services. For a carrier the practical question is the same in every case — can the network produce what a valid order names, and nothing more.

The two categories a lawful-intercept order can reach. Call-identifying information is the signaling around a communication — numbers, addresses, times, durations. Call content is the communication itself: the audio of a call, the payload of an Internet session. Orders authorize one or both; the solution must be able to deliver either without leaking the other. In broadband standards the equivalents are CmII and CmC.

A court order under Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 (18 U.S.C. § 2510 and following) authorizing interception of the content of communications. It is the full-content intercept: the highest bar of legal process, time-limited, and specific to a named target.

Legal process (18 U.S.C. § 3121 and following) for capturing dialing, routing, addressing and signaling information — the numbers a line calls and the numbers that call it — without content. On a modern network this is a call-identifying-information intercept, delivered in the same standardized format as a content intercept, minus the content.

The point where a target's traffic is picked out of the network. Active: the network element itself is provisioned to copy the target's traffic to the mediation system. Passive: a probe watches a mirror (TAP or SPAN) port, identifies the target's traffic and copies only that. Both end in the same place — a standardized stream bound for the agency.

The component that turns what the access function captured into what the agency can use: it identifies the target, collects the sessions, converts them to the delivery standard the order requires, and hands them off over a secured connection — while logging every action for the record.

The published safe-harbor standards for lawful intercept — a family with one standard per network type: the ATIS standards in the United States for circuit-switched and wireless, VoIP and broadband Internet access networks, the 3GPP handover interfaces for LTE and 5G mobile networks, and the ETSI standards abroad. Each is revised over time. A solution built to the current standard that matches the network is what earns the carrier CALEA's safe-harbor presumption.

The Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions — the U.S. standards body whose committees of carriers, equipment makers, trusted third parties and law enforcement develop most of the lawful-intercept delivery standards used under CALEA — one for each network type, revised over time. An intercept delivered to a U.S. agency arrives in an ATIS-defined format.

The European Telecommunications Standards Institute — the body whose lawful-interception handover standards define how intercepted communications are handed over to law-enforcement facilities in Europe and much of the rest of the world. Subsentio delivers to ATIS in the United States and ETSI for its international clients.

The policies and procedures a carrier files with the FCC under 47 CFR § 1.20005 describing how it supervises and controls interceptions — who may authorize one, what counts as appropriate legal and carrier authorization, how records are kept, and a senior officer law enforcement can reach 24 hours a day. Filed before commencing service and updated within 90 days of a merger, divestiture or policy change; since June 2023, through the CALEA Electronic Filing System (CEFS).

Tracking every piece of legal process from receipt to closure: the order's authority and scope, the dates it is valid, what was provisioned or produced, who handled each step, and when it was terminated or returned. It is what makes an intercept or a records response defensible later — at a suppression hearing, an audit, or a deposition — and it is the part of compliance a carrier most often underestimates.

A bill introduced in the United States Senate in 2020 that proposed requiring service providers and device makers to be able to decrypt data and communications when served with a court order, once a provider reached a certain scale. It became the reference point in the debate over encryption and lawful access. Its status changes with each Congress — check its current status before relying on it; nothing in CALEA today requires a carrier to break encryption it did not apply.

Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (17 U.S.C. § 512) limits a service provider's liability for copyright infringement by its users — for transitory transmission, caching, storage at a user's direction, and information-location tools — provided the provider meets the section's conditions. For an ISP the conditions that matter most are a designated agent on file and a reasonably implemented repeat-infringer policy.

The person or office a copyright owner sends infringement notices to. To rely on the § 512 safe harbor a provider must register its designated agent with the U.S. Copyright Office's online directory and keep the registration current; registrations are renewed on a three-year cycle. An unregistered or lapsed agent puts the safe harbor at risk regardless of how well notices are handled.

The § 512 process: a copyright owner sends a notice meeting the statute's elements, the provider acts expeditiously on it, the affected subscriber is informed and may send a counter-notice, and the material may be restored if the owner does not file suit within the statutory window. Each step has form requirements; a defective notice is not a valid notice.

A condition of the § 512 safe harbor: the provider must adopt, reasonably implement and inform subscribers of a policy for terminating, in appropriate circumstances, subscribers who are repeat infringers. The statute does not define "repeat" or prescribe the steps — the provider does, in writing, and then follows what it wrote.