NeuStar Fiduciary Services is helping Spirit Telecom perform surveillance actions such as wiretaps in order to comply with a federal regulation

Raymond McConville

June 19, 2007

2 Min Read
NeuStar 'Spies' Another Customer

CHICAGO -- NXTComm -- Neustar Inc. (NYSE: NSR) enables many of its customers to comply with federal law enforcement regulations. Today it will help yet another -- Spirit Telecom LLC .

The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), a federal law in effect since 1994, requires all carriers to modify their networks so that they are capable of performing wiretaps of citizens and making detailed call records available for law enforcement agencies. NeuStar Fiduciary Services has been helping carriers comply with it since 2002.

Spirit Telecom now becomes NeuStar's latest compliance project. Based in South Carolina, Spirit owns many small and medium sized ILECs through out the southeastern United States.

"This is an interesting customer win for us because of the several different clients involved. They have about 200 customers in the Southeast," says Mike Warren, VP of Fiduciary Services for NeuStar.

Warren is a 30-year veteran of the FBI and spent the last four years of his career there working on CALEA. After leaving the FBI, he founded Fiducianet in 2002, which was then acquired by NeuStar in early 2005.

NeuStar provides these services mainly to small- and medium-sized carriers that can't perform these compliances in as cost-effective and scaleable a way as NeuStar can do it for them.

Most of the Tier 1 carriers perform these services in-house, but NeuStar does have some contracts with big companies like Verizon Wireless , and it handles all CALEA compliance issues for Time Warner Cable Inc. (NYSE: TWC).

In addition to providing the technological means to initiate a wiretap, NeuStar also employs a large legal team that works to ensure the surveillances are performed within legal boundaries. "We had to develop a program that wouldn't expose our clients to criminal liability," says Warren.

Warren claims that his group was the first to offer these services back in 2002. These days, its most notable competitor is VeriSign Inc. (Nasdaq: VRSN).

— Raymond McConville, Reporter, Light Reading

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