Procera new data intrcepting solution meets CALEA new requirement
What with the firestorm over the NSA domestic eavesdroping campaign, broadband providers have a 14 May deadline to allow law enforcement agencies to intercept and capture suspicious data transmission without compromising the privacy of innocent cstomers; a California company comes up with a solution
While politicians, privacy advocates, and legal experts debate the merit of the NSA domestic eavesdropping campaign; and as security experts argue that the new communication environment, characterized by wireless and IP telephony, make it impractical to rely on the traditional, by-warrant-only eavesdropping on suspects, there is a deadline looming for law-enforcement agencies. On 14 May 2007 a new regulatory requirement kicks in: The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) requires broadband service providers (BSPs) to have proper tools in place by that date to isolate, intercept, export, and selectively monitor in real-time a legally identified criminal suspect on the BSP’s network, without compromising the constitutional right to privacy for the rest of the customers on the network.
The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) defined the requirements for CALEA, which was originally enacted back in the more innocent and simpler mid-1990s to help law enforcement agencies process warrants for listening to standard analog telephone communications. The Internet has gained popularity as a communication medium during the last decade, so CALEA has been modified to include the procedures and technical requirements for BSPs to intercept Internet-based communications lawfully, including data and VoIP calls originating or terminating on the Internet.
Los Gatos, California-based Procera Networks (OTCBB: PRNW) has come up with a solution which would help BSPs cope with, and law enforcement agencies benefit from, the new regulation. The company’s new PacketLogic Lawful Intercept platform is a flow-based traffic management system aimed at helping BSPs and VoIP interconnect providers intercept Internet data which is requested by law enforcement agencies under a court ordered warrant, and provide the contents of the data to these agencies. As far as we can tell PacketLogic is the first commercial platform available to meet the new CALEA requirement.
This is how it works: When a law enforcement agency issues a legal warrant to a BSP, the Caller Identifying Information (CII) or Call Content (CC), such as VoIP traffic, to and from a particular user is captured or redirected by the Procera platform, and sent to the law enforcement agency for real-time forensic analysis. Note that the warrant has to be very specific about the types of data traffic to be captured and distribution process to the law enforcement agencies. This is the point made by Albert Lopez, VP of Product Management at Procera Networks. “Procera’s CALEA platform is deployed throughout the service provider’s network infrastructure and provides the Law Enforcement Agencies with an Internet wiretap mechanism that can only be accessed and triggered through a legal warrant,” he says. “Our new PacketLogic Lawful Intercept platform securely isolates very specific information on the network requested by a warrant while protecting the privacy of information not covered by that warrant.”
-read more in this news release
