Vodafone in a landmark move, has published its first report that discusses its law enforcement disclosure requirements across 29 jurisdictions, purely discussing those in which requests were received.
In most countries, governments have powers to order communications operators to allow the interception of customers’ communications. This is known as ‘lawful interception’ (previously known as ‘wiretapping’). This involves mobile operators providing real-time information on the content of communications – phone calls, text of emails and more.
These requests were largely of 2 kinds:
- lawful interception
- access to communications data
They have not not included another intervention governments make, requesting that specific content be blocked. Creating this report was an interesting challenge for them, as they are often constrained from revealing what demands they receive, by law enforcement and national security legislation. For instance Indian regulators require that telecommunication service providers maintain extreme secrecy in matters concerning lawful interception.
Interestingly this is not confined to countries such as India and Qatar. It is unlawful to provide aggregate data on lawful interception practically anywhere. However, there are several countries where either by circumstance or choice, such interception mechanisms have not been implemented. These include the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Kenya and, surprisingly, France.
They also raise a key point that they are publishing this report although really they see this to be a responsibility that government should have. It is not something that an individual operator can offer a full picture about.
They provide details of warrants, but as digital lives grow complex, each could cover many types of communication services.
We tried to examine what this means for Digital Money of different kinds. For instance, what could ‘lawful interception’ mean for users of cryptocurrencies? It is very difficult to identify a criminal purely through their online activity due to the anonymity cryptocurrencies provide. But, in the case of Bitcoin and several other cryptocurrencies, making transactions involves broadcasting certain information over the internet that can be used to track you.
Take the example of a known criminal. If the police have a good reason to suspect him of criminal activities, they can make a request to monitor his internet traffic. Every time he makes a transaction using Bitcoin, he effectively broadcasts 3 things: his ‘wallet number’, the ‘wallet number’ of the person he is sending Bitcoin to and the value of the transaction.
If the criminal’s identity is already known, then the police could immediately know his Bitcoin wallet too, and everyone who he has made transactions with it. This leaves the wallet vulnerable to confiscation, accomplices open to prosecution and the criminal himself should be fairly easy to gather evidence on, we expect.
For full details by country, and a download of the Vodafone report are available here: Law Enforcement Disclosure Report.