A couple of months back, there was a discussion on this list about the ETSI standard for lawful intercept and the lack of available open source implementations of the standard.

After some preliminary research and consultation with a handful of operators, WAND (and myself in particular) are putting together a proposal to develop an ETSI-compliant lawful intercept software tool, provided that this is still something that will be of use to people in the NZNOG community.

We propose that the resulting software will be open-source and freely available to anyone, but that anyone who wants to see this project progress quickly should consider chipping in some funding to help cover the cost of having a dedicated programmer working on this for ~10-20 hours a week. The total funding pool doesn't need to be overly large: I am confident we will need much less than some of the numbers I've been hearing as the likely cost of a single piece of ETSI-compliant vendor kit.

Of course, anyone who is providing funding would be consulted during the development process to ensure that the resulting software will be compatible with their particular network configuration.

For now, I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who would like to use this software, regardless of whether you are able to fund the development or not. Replies can be on or off list.

If we get enough interest, we would be looking at holding a meeting with anyone interested in funding later on this month (probably in Hamilton) to discuss the requirements for the software and how the funding model is going to work. The goal is to try and have the software in a deployable state (including being signed-off by police as being compliant) by April.

I'm happy to take further questions or comments, either on or off list.

Thanks,

Shane Alcock

Research Programmer

WAND