Communication Service Providers (CSPs) today are deploying advanced, 5G-ready, cloud-native lawful and location intelligence technologies that create efficiencies, comply with regulatory mandates, and help protect society. These solutions have been built for real-time intelligence gathering at large-scale while also protecting subscriber privacy, and this principle must not change in 2024.
The data created by CSPs has long been considered the “gold standard” for accurate information. However, with new networks there is much more encrypted data due to changes in communication trends like Over-The-Top (OTT) applications. This trend makes extracting actionable intelligence much more difficult for law enforcement.
Additionally, geopolitical tensions are creating a greater need for data that helps prevent terrorism and the expansion of organized crime. Yet regulators do not seem to be working with any sense of urgency to establish new guidelines that might help CSPs streamline compliance. While the human element of lawful intelligence can never be removed, the industry today requires solutions that better align CSPs and law enforcement in their common goal to protect public safety.
#1: Changes in Data
The amount of data available to investigators today is both a boon and a curse. The sheer volumes of information are overwhelming and the continued growth in end-to-end encryption makes the data almost impossible to use. And while the deployment of 5G Standalone networks, expansive encryption of communication links, and other advanced technologies may be progressing more slowly than expected, their continued adoption means LEAs will require innovative tools like social wires to extract intelligence from hidden communications and build key data points for persons of interest.
This year, investigators will need to focus on data fusion and analytic platforms as fewer and fewer people communicate using voice calls. This means less intelligence will come from analysts listening to warranted recorded phone conversations. In fact, criminals, organized crime, and terrorists today use so many different online forums and OTT apps to communicate, that analysts often face unique and disparate data flows in almost every case they investigate.
Rather than legacy investigative techniques, analysts and their tools need to focus on a holistic approach that uses powerful data analytics. Data augmentation will also be critical, such as the ability to combine lawfully intercepted data with open-source intelligence, financial records, automatic number plate readers (ANPRs), and more. To make this transition successfully, however, new investigative methodologies must be developed, which will be enhanced by AI tools.
#2: Changes in Focus
Heightened geopolitical tensions and increasing migration trends mean law enforcement and government entities must prioritize tools that gather intelligence to help solve and prevent crimes. To that end, location intelligence, metadata, social network analysis, and other new techniques will play a much greater role. With the risk of international terrorism and international organized crime increasing, highly accurate and precise location capabilities give analysts the enhanced ability to monitor crowd movements and control borders. Metadata and social wires help reveal a suspect’s potential involvement by identifying who they are connected to, when they connect, how and where they access social media, and the messages (encrypted or not) they send or the posts they make.
To aid in this effort, Artificial Intelligence must be prioritized – because criminals and terrorists are already using it. Language based analytics helps con artists and groomers identify lucrative but vulnerable targets. Deepfake technology can create images, audio, and video that can be used to coerce, defraud, or blackmail a person or groom a child for exploitation. Fake content can be used to illegally manipulate or influence everything from elections to stock prices and even scan cyber defenses to optimize the delivery of malware.
Much of the intelligence community understands this and innovative agencies are already adopting AI tools, such as leveraging Computer Vision for facial recognition and ANPR data to predict movements of suspects and vehicles. Trained AI helps with object detection and can identify the presence of a concealed weapon and even classify a firearm model in some cases. When voice calls are intercepted, voice analytics and language models can make estimates based on the speaker’s language such as regional dialect, gender, and even emotional state.
When building these algorithms however, it is important to avoid introducing bias. Network data from CSPs, for example, is highly reliable, while data from an open-source social media network must be carefully attributed. AI tools that incorporate unverified data run a real risk of producing false positives. Security features such as checksum analysis and hashed identifiers are also necessary to ensure security and privacy. Most importantly, regulatory guidelines must be established to create a legal framework within which investigators can employ AI-based solutions to prevent AI-assisted crimes.
#3: Change in Regulations and Standards
Currently, the regulations governing lawful and location intelligence are not keeping pace with the technologies available. Many mandated tasks and processes are antiquated and siloed. An automated, digital basis for the rules governing stakeholders will provide a nimbler framework that reduces the manual tasks CSP teams and LEA analysts must perform. It will also protect individual privacy with built-in authorization and access controls, easy configurability to local mandates, and auditing modules that are a critical element for good governance.
E-warrants, for example, can greatly reduce the time it takes for the legal authorization to gather intelligence on a target, shifting control of the process to the LEA. Additionally, streamlining the current long-term preservation and storage mandates placed on CSPs, by using automated warrant management tools and summary reporting, can lighten the burden on operators while preventing mishandling of evidence that jeopardizes cases.
In 2024, standards bodies need to continue to enhance specifications for the handover interfaces responsible for information exchange between CSPs and LEAs to make end-to-end automated warrant management feasible across the industry. Regulators must be proactive so the technological innovations that can help protect society and increase security can be fully operationalized.
#4: Change in Systems
The intelligence tools of the future must not only incorporate AI, but they must also be designed as end-to-end lawful and location intelligence platforms with common GUIs and visualization layers that allow analysts to be more efficient. They must be able to operate in public or private clouds or air-gapped environments and be 5G-ready and scalable for both general operational tasks and specialized, highly technical analytics. By deploying user-friendly platforms with simplified workflows capable of processing and filtering the drastic increase in data, analysts will gain more time to focus on extracting real investigative value.
Cloud-native tools featuring Kubernetes orchestration and containerized or virtualized network functions will give CSPs and LEAs the flexibility to spin-up lawful intercepts as needed, saving bandwidth, money, and other resources. These tools must be built in a way that helps bridge a growing gap between engineers who have spent their careers deploying legacy 3G and 4G networks and the skills needed to implement, operate, and maintain new, such platforms.
Conclusion
To help make the societies we live in safer and the lives of lawful intelligence stakeholders simpler in 2024, SS8 is focused on developing user-friendly, end-to-end solutions that leverage next generation tools and workflows, as well as using AI to help analysts sift through increasing volumes of encrypted data. We are incorporating data fusion capabilities to address increasing risks from terrorism and international organized crime and working to streamline intelligence gathering and improve interoperability. Finally, by designing these tools as cloud-native platforms built on microservices and pod-to-pod encryption, we are futureproofing them for the continued role out of 5GSA and beyond and positioning CSPs to create even greater efficiencies in the future while helping to protect public safety.
