Dear participants in the Law Enforcement Practionners Group,

Below is an udpate provided by Gabriel Andrews, co-chair of the GAC Public Safety Working Group, who continues to coordinate efforts discussed previously in the group, towards establishing authentication mechanisms for Law Enforcement requestors in the context of Urgent Request for registration data.

As we’ve delayed restarting the regular cadence of calls coming out of ICANN83 (summer break played a role here, thank you for your patience), I wanted to share with the group some updates:

1. Law Enforcement Portal Connections to ICANN (the “long term mechanism”): 
   Technical conversations between engineers at FBI, INTERPOL, and ICANN are progressing and productive.  We are working toward documentation of:

a.       A standardized data format for authentication to be passed to ICANN

b.       A description of how each agency conducts its own member verification (what steps are standard practice, etc), that can be shared publicly.

After such documentation is drafted

c.       I expect to share such with the LE Auth Practitioner Group.

d.       We will move toward sending test authentications.

e.       Currently we expect this dev work to be scheduled to begin Q1 of CY26 (January)

2. Sharing of known Law Enforcement Agency Domain Names from Europol, FBI, INTEPROL (the “short term mechanism”)

a.       List status

• FBI and Europol lists have been shared with ICANN Org.
• INTERPOL has begun collecting such information from their member nations and has already received a significant number of responses.

a.       Updates from ICANN are anticipated as to:

• Whether ICANN will seek to create Terms of Use for access to apply to the email domain lists (e.g. for registrars to agree to if accessing these lists via the Name Services Portal)
• Whether specific mechanisms for future list updates are preferred by ICANN (e.g. via FTP, secure portal, other)

3. Next LEA Authentication Practitioner Group Updates:

a.       Expect a cadence of (approximately) monthly updates hereafter, depending greatly on recent progress made. 

Thank you for your attention.

Best regards

Fabien Betremieux

GAC Support Team