27 March 2001

The ETSI Interception Dossiers

A free community service by Cryptome and Quintessenz.

1 Intro

Some of the documents Cryptome already has collected on this site can be downloaded from the European Telecom Standards Institute Site as well. They are buried in a state of the art database with hundreds of other technical standards, but they are neither very hard to find nor hard to get. You need to register first with ETSI and wait until you get an email confirmation.  Then type in the word "lawful" [without quotation marks].

This keyword triggers the outpout of currently 19 documents on interception interfaces for all kind of digital networks.
You can get for example the currently valid meta surveillance standard  ETSI ES 201.671 [Version 1.1.1 from June 99 in cluding digital telephony]  free of charge. But you will not get the draft version they are currently working at. Edition 2 Draft 13 already contains the interception proposals for the new General Packet Radio Service that will be piped over existing European cellular GSM-networks in the very near future. But more on that later.

Unlike other ETSI working groups the  "Lawful Interception Working Group" [ETSI SEC WG LI] develop their standards confidentially until the date of formal publication. There are of course other documents the members of the  Working Group SEC LI distribute strictly amongst themselves. Some of those documents should find their way to cryptome as well pretty soon for evaluation by the competent and the interested.

It takes some time indeed to detect the spooky passages they undeniably contain amongst the sheer mass of networking commands and protocols. That is why this brief series of tutorials on what has been known from 1997 as the "EU-FBI surveillance system" and later was brand named "ENFOPOL" in Europe are being offered on Cryptome. Expertise from around the world  is dearly welcome, just email John Young or

Erich M

Post/scrypt: For those of you who read German here is a shortened version of the ETSI Dossiers published in Telepolis  and a few articles on the matter in FutureZone

ETSI DOSSIERS: Jagd auf die Handy Daten
ABHOEREN IN AT: Lauschangriff per Standleitung
ETSI ES 201 671: Ein Überwachungs-Standard, den keiner will
ETSI.ORG: Neue Ueberwachungs-Standards für Europa