Lawful interception and monitoring centres are those which enable law enforcement agencies & intelligence organizations, to track & monitor communications of certain specific targets. In order to successfully accelerate the investigations of criminal actions, terrorism, and other threats, Lawful interception and monitoring centres have advanced capabilities for data collection, data analysis and court-compliance data.

These days, modern Lawful Interception system use advanced technologies that are based on big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning engines, for automatically converting data into intelligence, promoting investigations, and producing evidence.

What Is Lawful Interception?

Lawful Interception, in layman terms, is a wiretap. Lawful interception technologies allow the government to gather communication from specific users selectively. These are the technologies that are put in place by the telecommunications companies (which include email, phone and wireless providers).

These systems allow government agencies to intercept communication between certain users. Lawful interception gateways enable them to capture communications without any mass surveillance techniques which gather huge amounts of information.

In some jurisdictions, agencies can even intercept communications without alerting the telecoms providers. While in others, they are supposed to let the telecom/service provider know that they’re collecting data.

Here are the things that you need to keep in mind while looking for a modern lawful interception and monitoring centre:

Robustness

The communication domain is developing at a fast pace. And since higher rates and higher capacities are introduced, new technologies are expected to meet the new challenges. Additionally, a wide array of different types of data will continue to grow. Modern Lawful Interception and monitoring centres need to have unprecedented data collection abilities in order to deliver bullet-proof SIGINT collection.

A robust collection must ensure that no data is lost. You need to make sure that everything is collected all the content and metadata. This includes covering a wide variety of Lawful Interception interfaces such as ISP, mobile telephony, fixed telephony and historical data, as well as the additional external sources like open web, PCAP files, GPS trackers, external databases, forensic tools, etc.

Efficiency 

In order to convert data into valuable intelligence, the advanced Lawful Interception monitoring centre that you are choosing should be able to provide operators with intelligence & investigation insights at-a-glance, allowing faster time-to-evidence, by focusing attention on items that are of greatest interest. When the relevant data is emphasized for each target, the monitoring process will be quicker, smarter, and more efficient.

Moreover, it is imperative to have multiple investigative features & capabilities which can facilitate investigation speed, effectiveness and quality. These include complex multi-conditional intelligence querying, automatic profiling, context-based & investigation-based insights, advanced IP analysis, visual links & connections analysis, automatic transcription & speech analysis and more. 

Compliance

Facilitating complete court & regulation compliance is a lot more than just delivering reports which gives rise to the need for advanced technological abilities. A modern lawful interception system should have the following built-in capabilities:

ØCollection & Retention

• Regulatory Compliance – it should be compliant with global and local regulations & standards
• Stable Collection – there should be no data loss and down-time
• Scalable Retention – it should be able to customize as per customers’ needs & regulations

ØMonitoring Management

• Organizational Management – it should seek users’ permissions & assignments
• There should be target management for using warrants activation
• It should have full compartmentalization of data, users and investigations

ØCourt Compliance

It should have:

• Digital Signature
• Evidence Viewer
• Evidence media generation
• Full Auditing Trail

ØData Lifecycle Management

• It should have export & import policies
• It should be able to export & Archive easily and securely for storage or media
• The process must be fully automated 

Future Readiness

Lawful Interception and monitoring centres should be able to demonstrate its capability to support advanced IT environments and its flexibility to adapt to changes in all the aspects of Lawful Interception. A future-ready monitoring centre should be designed & developed to be:

• Open – which allow easy import & export of data
• Scalable & modular
• Fully secure – for both internal & external threats

Scalability

In order to address the challenges introduced by the new & advanced technologies of Lawful Interception, an advanced lawful interception and monitoring centre must be designed as an open & scalable platform, which can support:

• Multiple technologies
• Interoperability 
• Huge data amounts, volumes and rates
• Diverse international & local LI standards and protocols