Email the Author
You can use this page to email Ted Chao about Lawful Intercepts.
About the Book
For a long time, there is a veil covering lawful intercept. Most of people are thinking it as a tool by police and national security staff to carry on surveillance on ordinary civil people. In reality, lawful interception is an important mean to prevent crimes and terrorism spreading in cyber world now. In order to better present lawful interception at different angles for different readers, like technical staff and LEA planning officers with different working agendas, the organization of this book is divided in to 5 parts:
· The first part is the basic introduction on lawful interception operation with its restriction and boundaries in terms of network surveillance, difference from cyber intelligence, LI readiness with support of legal background, ETSI framework with compliant LI systems for practical deployment.
· The second part is the LI process in LEA side in terms of crime investigation process, cyber evidence acquisition, warrant management for auditing, and network forensic basics for data analysis and presentation.
· The third part is the review of LI systems in terms of law enforcement monitoring management (LEMF) system with warrant management, mediation device, protocol analyzer for content reconstruction, and media gateway for conversion between signaling and media. In this part, IT system planning of some common requirement, such as system sizing, information security, system resilience and business continuity…etc., will be also addressed. Though I worked for LI solution vendor for more than 7 years, I will not particularly specify the brand and model of any solution vendor. What I try to do is to provide the explanation on the de facto functions and feature those LI system should be. This can be reference for those solution vendors and LEA planning officers for the off the shelf products in market.
· The fourth part is the data access at different telecom networks in terms of network infrastructure with both user data plane and control plane of TDM, GSM, GPRS, IMS, Fixed Network, and 4G/5G networks. This part is quite important for LEA and system integrator to negotiate with telecom network administration team to deploy, manage and operate LI systems.
· The fifth part is the project management in terms of project planning, labor planning, budget/cost planning, customer acceptance test, training planning and maintenance planning. Though the focus of this part is at LI system delivery, most of content can be also applied to LI system customization during negotiation between LEA users and solution developers.
· The last part is case study with six true investigation cases handled by LEA through LI process in different countries. I have tried my best to omit the confidential part and present it with the best usage of LI systems in crime investigation.
Expected Readers in the Market
For my job, I have met lot of IT planning staff from LEA department and judicial staff of prosecutor and judge offices in many different countries. From my conversation with them, I understand even those work with crime investigation and legal proceeding everyday still have lots of misunderstanding and regard LI as black box processing, it is quite nature for ordinary civilians to have great fears and prejudice on lawful interception.
Due to some background knowledge needed for understanding LI, this book is written for those who want to know more details about LI operation for their works, such as:
— Officers of LEA in charge of planning, purchase, and deployment of LI systems, and front-end field investigator and lab analysts.
— Telecom network administrators in charge of network management involved with LI process.
— System integrator in charge of LI system deployment and maintenance.
— Solution providers in charge of LI system development and customization.
— Judicial officials in charge of crime legal proceeding.
— People who work with civil right and speech freedom on internet want to know more about LI to eliminate the necessary fearsome and fantasy.
Though some of confidential and sensitive information related to cyber crime detail process in designated cases, LI deployment in some designated TSP data centers, or specific investigation tools used in target telecom networks, I have carefully reviewed it and tried my best to hide these confidential details. Some of my LEA friends also give me advice on it to modify those details.
About the Author
Ted Chao is an IT consultant working on lawful interception and cyber intelligence projects worldwide. He has worked in a Taiwan LI solution company - Decision Group Inc. as technical consultant and chief project leader for more than 8 years since 2010. For the past 30 years, he worked as system integration manager, SAP basis consultant, project manager, technical product manager, product development team leader and technical consultant at Acer, Compaq, HP, Lucent Technologies, and Institute of Information Industry in Taiwan, Singapore, ASEAN and Middle East countries. During his profession period, he was also involved in many large deployment projects of SAP, cross border enterprise and municipal networks, lawful interception and cyber intelligence in many different countries.