New Phone Technology Bugs the FBI : Communications: The bureau seeks to block firms from deploying digital systems until they come up with a way to protect wiretaps.

The FBI wants the nation’s telephone companies to stop rolling out advanced digital phone systems that are stymieing the agency’s practice of listening in on criminal conversations.

At stake is the future of the wiretap, one of the bureau’s most effective investigative tools, which is getting harder to engineer as phone systems grow more complex.

The FBI says modern telephone networks, which rely on digital and fiber-optic systems, are already making it difficult to eavesdrop on phone calls during criminal probes.

As a result, the bureau has drafted legislation that would require phone companies to stop deploying digital technology until they can come up with a way to preserve the investigative wiretap.

For regional and long-distance phone companies that have spent billions of dollars to upgrade systems and galvanize the U.S. lead in telecommunications, the FBI proposals are late at best and anti-competitive at worst.

“It is late. . . . This stuff is already out there,” said Ken Pitt, a chief spokesman for Bell Atlantic Corp., one of seven regional telephone operating companies known as Baby Bells that were formed by the breakup of American Telephone & Telegraph Co.

AT&T; and the Baby Bells, as represented by the U.S. Telephone Assn., oppose the draft bill as written.

Researcher Douglas Conn, associate director of Columbia University’s Institute for Tele-Information, said the dispute could threaten the U.S. position in global communications.

“It is a very, very touchy and difficult issue. On the one side is the very real concern of the FBI. On the other are the telephone companies and organizations that support using an advanced telecommunications network to compete internationally,” Conn said.

But the FBI is pressing forward.

Bureau Director William Sessions recently wrote a column for the New York Times about the potential threat to the effectiveness of law enforcement.

“Wiretapping is one of the most effective means of combatting drug trafficking, organized crime, kidnaping and corruption in government,” Sessions wrote.

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation does not want the new digital technology that is spreading across America to impair this crucial law-enforcement technique.”

The FBI says it uses telephone wiretaps in just 1% of its investigations and only with a court warrant. But those cases tend to be major ones involving organized crime and drug traffickers.

By law, telephone companies are required to assist the FBI in court-approved wiretapping.

But company officials say they are baffled by the idea that the FBI, long known for inventing ingenious investigative tools, expects them to develop the new wiretap technology.