It can listen to your cell phone conversations. Wired News has the story, posted a few hours ago:

The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation’s telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.

The Wired News story is based on documents obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation under the Freedom of Information Act. Predictably, the EFF had to sue to get the documents released. More:

Together, the surveillance systems let FBI agents play back recordings even as they are being captured (like TiVo), create master wiretap files, send digital recordings to translators, track the rough location of targets in real time using cell-tower information, and even stream intercepts outward to mobile surveillance vans.

A Clinton-era law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, forces the telecoms to give the government complete backdoor access to their networks.

“CALEA revolutionizes how law enforcement gets intercept information,” [the FBI’s Anthony] DiClemente told Wired News. “Before CALEA, it was a rudimentary system that mimicked Ma Bell.”

Privacy groups and security experts have protested CALEA design mandates from the start, but that didn’t stop federal regulators from recently expanding the law’s reach to force broadband internet service providers and some voice-over-internet companies, such as Vonage, to similarly retrofit their networks for government surveillance.