FCC selects Swedish firm to run sensitive national database routing phone calls

The Federal Communications Commission selected a Swedish-owned firm to run a sensitive national database that routes billions of phone calls across the country, apparently satisfied that the award would not jeopardize national security. The vote by the five commissioners clears the way for Telcordia, owned by Ericcson and based in New Jersey, to proceed with the challenging task of building a system that can track calls and text messages by nearly every phone number in North America while ensuring the data remains secure.

The database handles the intercarrier routing of calls and texts for more than 650 million US phone numbers and for more than 2,000 carriers. If numbers are scrambled or deleted, a massive communications breakdown could occur. The database is particularly important for the FBI and other law enforcement agencies that query the database every day, several million times a year, in the course of criminal and intelligence investigations to track which phone company provides service for a particular number. Security experts say that if a foreign spy agency wants to know which of its agents the United States has under surveillance, it could attempt to hack the system to see what numbers the FBI has wiretaps on. The system includes the phone number, database and the platform that tells law enforcement which carrier owns which number.