Police1’s Spotlight articles introduce the products and services of valued sponsors in their own words. This article shines a spotlight on SS8 Networks, Inc. Based in California, SS8 specializes in lawful intelligence, location intelligence and communication monitoring solutions.
1) Where did your company name originate from?
The name SS8 was born from the idea of being “one better” than SS7, the protocol that revolutionized communications in the 1970s. Today, SS8 stands for more than signaling – it represents our unwavering commitment to driving innovation in lawful interception and data intelligence solutions to support criminal investigations.
2) What was the inspiration behind starting your company?
SS8 was founded in 2000 to address a gap in law enforcement evidence gathering. Existing methods relied mostly on physical taps into copper lines, authorized by a subpoena or search warrant. The shift from analog to digital telephony in the 1990s marked a sea change in which these traditional approaches became obsolete. In the digital era, analog-focused strategies produced only indecipherable strings of ones and zeroes that left law enforcement in the dark. From that engineering challenge, SS8 arose to redefine the field by moving interception to the network core with digital traffic mediation.
3) What is your signature product, and how does it work?
SS8’s lawful and location intelligence platform for investigators consists of four solutions:
- Intellego XT ingests lawful intelligence from communications service providers (CSPs) and allows reconstruction and analysis of voice and data communications.
- Globe provides advanced location analytics and is purpose-built for LEA and intelligence agency use cases such as geofencing, meeting detection and travel detection.
- MetaHub is a fusion center that pulls data and metadata from multiple sources (including Intellego XT Monitoring Center) and provides sophisticated queries, enrichment and analysis.
- Discovery is the new cloud-based version of our foundational Intellego XT platform. As a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, it delivers advanced data fusion, analytics and monitoring in a scalable platform. Subscription-based pricing allows agencies to adjust user access on demand based on case load, staffing changes or budget constraints.
4) Why do you believe your products are essential to law enforcement?
The data landscape has become overwhelming for investigative analysts. At the same time, heightened geopolitical tensions make national security as paramount as ever. SS8’s platform helps law enforcement and intelligence agencies extract communications data from mobile networks, combine it with third-party data sources like financial records or OSINT, and analyze and visualize the information in intuitive dashboards. The platform’s data filtering, buffering and query features help analysts make sense of siloed data, uncover hidden patterns and relationships, and identify and track suspects. Features such as iDossier allow investigators to build digital case files, and automation and machine learning streamline their workflows and reduce data fatigue. Most important, robust access controls and audit logs ensure evidence is admissible in court.
5) What has been the biggest challenge your company has faced?
The biggest challenge we face is the speed with which criminals adapt and implement new technologies. Unlike law enforcement agencies, organized crime groups and terrorists often have very deep pockets and no guardrails around how they deploy tools like encrypted messaging, location tacking software or generative AI. SS8’s mission is to arm law enforcement agencies with the advanced technologies needed to fight these trends as quickly and cost-effectively as possible while staying within budget and protecting the privacy of citizens.
6) What makes your company unique?
SS8 offers defensive intelligence tools. We do not provide phone-hacking spyware or build software to breach encrypted communications. While the threats to public safety today require powerful tools, we do not believe in “offensive” software that may compromise privacy and public confidence in the rule of law. Global experience confirms the burgeoning market in such intelligence gathering techniques lacks accountability and is ripe for misuse. By advancing state-of-the-art capabilities in lawful intelligence, we explicitly intend to reduce the need for and role of offensive measures.
7) What do your customers like best about you and your products?
Intellego XT and our suite of investigative solutions are designed by law enforcement, for law enforcement and made in the United States. Our 25 years of experience in lawful intelligence has taught us how to build tools that help streamline workflows and help analysts maximize their effectiveness to solve crimes faster. Our intelligent query language makes searching your data easy, and detailed visualizations like heat maps, link charts and timelines help reveal hidden clues and relationships. Automated alerts bring important information to the attention of analysts in real time. Features like our automated warrant management remove administrative tasks so investigators can focus on intelligence gathering without jeopardizing the evidentiary chain of custody. In short, everything is designed to make analysts’ jobs easier and more efficient so they can save lives.
8) What is the most rewarding part of serving the first responder/local government community?
Helping save lives and protect public safety. Everyone at SS8 takes immense pride in their work because we know law enforcement, intelligence agencies and first responders depend on our solutions every day for mission-critical intelligence gathering and location information. Our years of work in the industry have shown us how criminals are quickly adapting emerging technologies to take advantage of citizens, and we’re proud to offer the tools and solutions that help governments fight back. We understand anyone can be a victim, and one day it could be our family or friends in danger. So whether it’s helping map relationships in an organized crime outfit, protect borders from international trafficking and smuggling, or locate emergency callers, SS8 is proud to support those who keep our societies safe.
9) Do you support any charitable organizations within public safety/community? Tell us more.
One of the charities we support is the Internet Watch Foundation based in Cambridge, England. Its remit is “to minimize the availability of online sexual abuse content, specifically child sexual abuse images and videos hosted anywhere in the world and nonphotographic child sexual abuse images hosted in the U.K.” IWF has developed mechanisms to digitally and automatically identify such images using MD5 hashing, which SS8 incorporates in Intellego XT to help law enforcement counter the potential harm to children, the investigators who must review this disturbing material and society at large.
10) What’s next for your company? Any upcoming new projects or initiatives?
SS8 is leading the push toward what we call augmented intelligence. As AI and machine learning mature, we are incorporating features and automations designed to make investigators more effective – not replace them. Technology will never replace the experience and intuition of a seasoned officer or analyst. But it can improve their efficiency and lower operational costs. We’re adding natural language processing capabilities that give analysts speech-to-text transcription to parse audio and improve its searchability. Visual AI will automate the recognition of individuals, license plates and locations at mass scale from collections of images or video. By leveraging these advanced technologies to correlate data points and detect relationships, patterns and anomalies, SS8 helps human operators direct investigations more effectively.