The FCC and Rural Call Completion

The Federal Communications Commission is requiring phone companies with more than 100,000 domestic subscribers to submit aggregated reports on calls that customers make to rural areas. It's part of an effort to crack down on a problem known as "rural call completion," in which calls to remote parts of the country get dropped or never make it through. By requiring phone companies to submit those reports on rural call completion, the FCC thinks it has a shot at curbing what Sen Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has called an "unacceptable problem." Yet to a casual observer, the FCC's request could be easily mistaken for another, more insidious form of privacy intrusion. At its most basic level, the components are all there: A worthy goal everyone can get behind; corporate retention of user data; quiet, confidential reports to the government. But there are subtle differences between the NSA's systematic surveillance program and what the FCC is trying to accomplish. For one thing, the retention period is a lot shorter: Phone companies are obligated to retain the individual call records for six months before discarding them. What's more, the FCC doesn't have access to the individual call records, while the NSA has a giant database that it could query virtually anytime. Here's what the FCC sees in the reports it gets quarterly from phone companies: The number of attempted calls to rural phone providers per month; the number of those calls that were answered; and the number of calls that failed to complete.