Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) in 1994 to make it easier for law enforcement to wiretap digital telephone networks. CALEA forced telephone companies to redesign their network architectures to make wiretapping easier. It expressly did not regulate data traveling over the Internet.

On August 5, 2005, the FCC announced a Final Rule, expanding CALEA to Internet broadband providers and certain Voice-over-IP (VoIP) providers.