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Oasis Forms "Lawful Intercept" XML Committee
An anonymous reader writes "Oasis has announced the formation of the Lawful Intercept XML Technical Committee. The announcement refers to it as a "universal global framework for supporting rapid discovery and sharing of suspected criminal and terrorist evidence by law enforcement agencies." It's not really clear if this is supposed to aid in information exchange about suspicious activities/individuals, or 'intercepting' in the sense of eavesdropping, or what exactly."
Indeed so. While 'uncool', lawful interception tends to be a prerequisite to deploying many types of technology - for example the GSM mobile system has had a detailed specification for what information can be intercepted, and how this must be achieved, for many years (you can start from GSM 01.33 specification and work your way out...)
This type of technology can, self-evidently, generate vast quantities of data, and each network equipment vendor currently generates in a different format. It's simply a way to ensure that data which would have been logged anyway is provided to law enforcement agencies in a standardised way.
Probably true to argue that this will be used for ISP logs etc. but the key point is this: "lawful interception". In the UK, and doubtless most of the 'Western' world, this requires a court order, but in these 'terrorist' domainated days, the criteria which are sufficient to get such an order are becoming ever less stringent "...well, he was a commie as a student, and anyone with a beard like that must be an international terrorist, your honour..."
The job of the concerned citizen is not to fight the enabling technology, but to ensure, through the democratic process, lobbying and protest as required, that the use by government agencies of these technologies stays within reasonable (whatever that means) grounds.
Dw