Oct 14 2004
The South African
government and its intelligence agencies are putting finishing touches
to a raft of interception regulations that will oblige all mobile and
fixed operators and ISPs to provide real-time monitoring of all voice
and data telecommunications services offered in the country, including
all SMS, WAP, MMS, USSD and GPRS traffic,
says
Leon Perlman.
Technical
modalities and policy issues have delayed implementation of these
regulations which give effect to the Regulation of Communications and
Provisions of Communication-related Information Act of 2002. The
government wants the Acts’ directives in place by the end of 2004.
"Ostensible grounds
for an interception order under the Act are criminal investigations,
threats to public health, national security and safety or compelling
national economic interests, or to assist foreign law enforcement
agencies with any interception," says Perlman.
It is thought that the SA system will
augment the huge global Echelon interception system operated by many
Western governments. Civil liberty groups, privacy advocates and smaller
ISPs burdened with conforming
to the interception requirements
have decried the Act’s onerous provisions. Failure to comply may result
in licenses being cancelled.
Although the
operators have been cooperating with the security agencies in cases
where there is a warrant to intercept communications of criminal
suspects, the new law takes it a quantum step further, banning any
telecommunications service providers – like mobile operators and ISPs -
that don’t offer a service capable of being monitored. Operators must
now, at the direction of a judge and so-called ‘interception
directions’, provide real-time information, archived information of logs
and decryption data when ordered to do
so, for up to three months at a time.
In addition to
monitoring voice calls, operators must lists of dialed numbers, the
MSISDN of the called party, the type of call, participants in conference
calls, identification of the base stations used, access to all
voicemails, and any forwarding call numbers. GPRS data must be packet
sniffed, as must any CSD data, USSD, WAP and SMS traffic. Any standard
GSM encryption techniques like A5 must be disabled for live monitoring
The Act also makes
it an offence to posses a stolen phone or SIM card, and failure to
report a SIM card stolen, lost or damaged becomes an offence. It also
bans altering IEMI serial numbers of phones where that will hide the
true identity of the user. Users of cellphones with built-in encryption
or those with third-party clip-on encryption modules will also have to
hand over their PINs and encryption keys when challenged under the Act.
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