GSMA, 3GPP SA3, ETSI standards, NIS2, CIPA Lawful Interception.
On 17 May 1865, after a conference running from 1 March, twenty European states signed the first International Telegraph Convention in Paris and created the International Telegraph Union — the body that became today's ITU.
After RMS Titanic sank in April 1912, Congress amended the Wireless Ship Act on 23 July 1912 (two operators, continuous watch, auxiliary power) and passed the Radio Act on 13 August 1912, requiring federal licences for all US radio stations.
Signed by President Roosevelt on 19 June 1934, the Communications Act abolished the Federal Radio Commission and created the Federal Communications Commission, uniting regulation of interstate telephone, telegraph and radio under one agency.
Bell Labs and Alan Turing developed SIGSALY (Project X), the world's first digital voice encryption terminal, securing high-level Allied communications between Washington and London during WWII.
Shannon's paper in the Bell System Technical Journal (vol. 28, no. 4, October 1949, pp. 656–715) put cryptography on a mathematical footing. It was a declassified version of his confidential 1945 Bell Labs report "A Mathematical Theory of Cryptography".
In a decision adopted on 26 June 1968 (13 F.C.C.2d 420), the FCC held that AT&T's tariff ban on customer-supplied equipment was unreasonable and unlawful, allowing devices like Thomas Carter's Carterfone to connect to the telephone network.
Judge Harold Greene ordered the breakup of AT&T's monopoly into 7 Regional Bell Operating Companies (Baby Bells), creating multi-operator interconnects and new signaling boundaries.
On 16 April 1993 the White House announced the NSA-designed Clipper Chip, a voice-encryption chip whose keys would be escrowed with the government; it was adopted as FIPS 185 in February 1994, and in 1994 AT&T Bell Labs researcher Matt Blaze showed the escrow mechanism could be bypassed.
The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) forced US telecom carriers to design their networks so that lawful interception could be performed on demand — embedding a permanent surveillance capability into the core of every switch.
At 22:34 UTC on 27 January 2011 (00:34 on 28 January in Cairo) Egypt's ISPs withdrew nearly all their BGP routes, and on 28 January the government ordered Vodafone, Mobinil and Etisalat to suspend mobile services in specified areas; internet routes returned on 2 February.
The US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence published a bipartisan investigative report concluding that Huawei and ZTE equipment posed systemic national security risks to critical telecom backbones.
The GSM Association launched its formal Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) program and Hall of Fame, establishing standard operating procedures for researchers to responsibly report 2G–5G protocol and core vulnerabilities.
On 31 March 2020 the FCC adopted its First Caller ID Authentication Report and Order (FCC 20-42), implementing the December 2019 TRACED Act by requiring voice providers to deploy STIR/SHAKEN in the IP portions of their networks by 30 June 2021.
Between 17 and 20 September 2022 an attacker extracted customer records from Australian carrier Optus via an Internet-facing API; Optus said up to 9.8 million records were affected, while the ACMA later cited over 9.5 million current and former customers.
NIS2 (Directive (EU) 2022/2555) had to be transposed by 17 October 2024, bringing public electronic communications networks and services, IXPs, DNS and other digital-infrastructure providers under mandatory risk-management and incident-reporting duties. After letters of formal notice to 23 Member States in November 2024, the Commission sent reasoned opinions to 19 on 7 May 2025; in July 2026 it referred Ireland, Spain, France and the Netherlands to the EU Court of Justice.
In May 2025, after a photo showed national security adviser Mike Waltz using TeleMessage's modified Signal app, 404 Media reported a hacker had accessed archived messages from its servers; owner Smarsh suspended all TeleMessage services on 5 May.