Lawful Interception

CALEA Compliance: Do it yourself or Outsource?

Congress enacted the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (“CALEA”) in 1994, requiring telecommunications service providers to assist law enforcement agencies in executing electronic surveillance, according to a court order or other lawful authorization. Since 2006, the Federal Communications Commission (“FCC”) has extended the requirements of CALEA to service providers of two-way interconnected VoIP and […]

Why Yaana filed in this FCC Rule-making Proceeding?

A LI standards colleague brought to our attention that without most people realizing it, the FCC had on its own created a new CALEA rulemaking proceeding with a proposed CALEA technical standard. CALEA as you probably know is the 1994 law in the U.S. that requires communication providers to have the technical capacity to provide […]

5G Security – Metrics of the Engaged

This past month on 03-06 March, the global industry sub-group that exists at the center of 5G security met virtually. It is known as SA3 within the 3GPP organization, and it met over a period of five days to deal with some of the most important 5G security requirements. 3GPP is a “partnership” created among […]

WTSA-2020: Reflecting on a Contemporary ITU-T Role

Setting the stage Every four years — as it has done for nearly a hundred years — the ITU-T as the world’s only global intergovernmental standards body for all telecommunication, invites its 196 sovereign state members to a meeting where they examine their work and set the stage for the next four years. There is […]

Cybersecurity Standards Practices as Cyber Threats

One of the most embarrassing and pernicious realities in the world of cybersecurity is the stark reality that some industry cybersecurity standards practices are themselves cyber threats. How so? Most industry and intergovernmental standards bodies serve as means for assembling the constantly evolving collective knowledge of participant experts and package the resulting specifications and best […]

Understanding 5G: A Basic Primer

The initial, essential step toward understanding 5G is to perform an intellectual body purge of the endless disgorging of cluelessness and disinformation that emerges from the Washington White House and radiates out around that city and then to the outside world that it infects. The institutes, pundits, self-professed experts, summits, and even the U.S. press […]

5G Security Transparency

There is considerable rhetoric propagated today about 5G security. Some of the more blatant assertions border on xenophobia with vague assertions that the 5G vendors from some countries cannot be trusted and wholesale government banning is required. Existing treaty obligations are being summarily abrogated in favor of bilateral trade bullying. These are practices that the […]

House Encryption Working Group Report: Falls Short

On December 20, 2016, the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Encryption Working Group released its Year-End Report. Although, the topic invites politics and rhetoric by its nature, and its conclusions of more “exploration” are certainly appropriate, the report also falls short in several areas.

NFV Plenary #16 wraps up 2016 in Shenzhen

The industry’s principal Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) standards venue wrapped up the year in the world’s powerhouse electronics capital, Shenzhen, December 12-15, hosted by Huawei Technologies. 176 participants under the leadership of newly elected plenary chair Diego Lopez of Telefónica, fielded 80 input documents. The event included multiple NFV sub-group meetings, a joint meeting with the MEC (Mobile Edge Computing) standards group, a Huawei workshop, and a special 5G session. ETSI also provided an update on the first NFV plugtests for interoperability among almost every vendor being held in Madrid for the week beginning January 23.