23 December 2009. Thanks to A.

Also:

The Modern Spook's Data Retention Wish List (Part One)

The Modern Spook's Wish List Part Three

The Modern Spook's Wish List

Part Two

Featuring not-so-public documents from the European Telecom Standards Institute (ETSI) and presenting three more spooks; and answering the question why Mark, Mark and Ian, the merry men from GCHQ, are not allowed to spy on Koen and Gerd, their Dutch and German counterparts and vice versa.

As shown in Part I of the Spook's Wish List the editing of the ETSI standard for retained telecom and internet traffic data is done by the NTAC unit of the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). In ETSI Technical Committee Lawful Interception (TC LI), Mssrs Mark Shepherd and Mark Canterbury are serving as editors for the data retention standard documents.

There is no official TC LI members list available, but obviously Mark and Mark should be members. We will come to other TC LI members later.

The related Working Group (WG) SA3 LI is a wee bit less secretive. These good folks even sport regular lists of attendees (see the documents below) of their meetings.

The third man from GCHQ

NTAC staffer number three in ETSI is the secretary of SA3 LI, Ian Cooper. So every single document produced in this WG passes the desks of GCHQ before anybody else knows what it contains exactly. Bloody clever, the British, aren't they?

So the GCHQ controls both the ETSI data retention standard and the working group updating the live interception interface standard ES 201 671. This venerable surveillance interface - in fact it is a switch - is embedded in more or less all GSM/UMTS networks worldwide.

Thou shalt not spy

This quote opens all SA3 LI meeting reports, three of them are offered below. Gist: "Thou shalt not spy on thy neighbour:"

"When attending a 3GPP SA3 LI meeting [...] a delegate must not attempt to invade other delegate’s computers or read their papers without explicit permission. Anyone found violating this trust will be asked to remove himself or herself from the meeting."

What an interesting biotope that is, what an atmosphere of eschewing, nay, asceticism! No real prying, no spying, just talking about it.

Now, let us peruse the lists of SA3 LI attendees a bit. You find them in the annex sections close to the bottom of each document. Aside from Mr. Cooper, two more spooks materialize immediately, one being a Dutchman the other German.

Mijnheer Jaspers and Herr Steinrücke

Koen Jaspers is one of the veterans in the ETSI surveillance groups and works for the NTAC counterpart PIDS, which denotes "Platform Interceptie, Decryptie en Signaalanalyse." You can find him as early as 1999 in meeting reports of ETSI SecLI, the predecessor of SA3 LI (see document below).

In earlier times you'd find instead of GCHQ only the "Department of Trade and Industry" or/and the "Home Office" staffers. Mijnheer Jaspers joined around 1999 then as a member of ITO ("Informatie en communicatie technologie organisatie"), a police body. You can find a set of historic documents here on Cryptome.

Spook number three is Gerd Steinrücke, representing the German "Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz" the "Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution". What a noble duty that is: protecting the German constitution by means of spying on all German citizens. Maybe he is just there to learn a few new tricks from the merry men of GCHQ or - by somebody else.

In part three we will take a closer look to see whether we can identify more spooks and even come up with a photo. Sneak preview: Yes, we can.

So we close this chapter wondering which categories the above-mentioned gentlemen might match in this paraphrase of master William M. Thackeray:

"There are relative and positive Spooks. I mean by positive, such persons as are Spooks everywhere, in all companies, from morning till night, from youth to the grave, being by Nature endowed with Spookishness--and others who are Spooks only in certain circumstances and relations of life." (W. M. Thackeray "The Book of Snobs", Chapter I, "The Snob Playfully Dealt With").

Please report findings and other expertise or metacritique of the document using this info:

29DD 76FF 67E3 1051 914B 2E66 A3BE 9B4E BCC5 5231

and this link:

http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=Harkank&op=index

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Working Group SA3 LI Documents:

http://cryptome.org/sa3-li/2009_02_10_SA3-LI_Dublin_meeting_report.pdf

http://cryptome.org/sa3-li/2009_04_28_SA3-LI_San_Francisco_meeting_report.pdf

http://cryptome.org/sa3-li/2009_07_14_SA3-LI_Berlin_meeting_report_r_1.pdf

ETSI SecLI Document:

http://cryptome.org/sa3-li/1999_10_19_Sec-LI_Sophia_meeting.pdf

Previous ETSI intercept documents:

http://cryptome.org/etsi-intercept.htm

http://cryptome.org/e-spy-telecom.htm