PUTTING THE FBI ON HOLD : WIRELESS INDUSTRY REJECTS AGENCY PHONE TECHNOLOGY.

Byline: John Markoff The New York Times

In a showdown with the Justice Department, the wireless communications industry voted Thursday to reject government-backed technology that would make it possible for law enforcement agencies to keep closer tabs on cellular telephone users.

The government contends it has the right to use powerful new surveillance technology under a 1994 law to bring law-enforcement techniques into the modern era.

Among other abilities, the Justice Department wants to be able to determine the location of a cellular phone caller within a half-second and almost instantly monitor the status of cellular-phone voice mail, conference calls and other wireless communications features.

But many industry executives say the new cellular abilities would be burdensomely expensive to administer, and privacy groups argue that the measures would give law enforcement too much power.

Operators of cellular and other wireless networks, including AT&T and Cellular One, as well as manufacturers of the equipment, are working toward a June 1998 deadline to bring networks into compliance with the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994.

Thursday's vote in Los Angeles, by a subcommittee of a network operators and manufacturers group called the Telecommunications Industry Association, came in response to a technical document the FBI has been quietly circulating to industry executives since April.

The 1994 law was intended to enable law enforcement agencies to maintain wiretap and surveillance activities that they had long wielded in crime investigations.

Such surveillance has become harder to practice as more voice and data communications take place in the digitized code understood by computers, compared with old-fashioned analog communications, in which electronic signals mimic sound waves much more conducive to eavesdropping.

Like wireless industry executives, privacy rights advocates contend that the Justice Department has sought substantially broader powers than Congress granted.

``The law was designed to freeze the FBI in time,'' said Jerry Berman, the director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group in Washington. ``The FBI is going far beyond the law and asking the cellular telephone network to become an ongoing real-time tracking system for anyone under suspicion.''

FBI officials said they never intended to ask for real-time tracking but simply the same type of location information already routinely available in tracing traditional telephone calls.