Under the Hood of AT&T's Monitoring System

pkbarbiedoll writes "The recent discovery of AT&T's monitoring program has raised more than a few eyebrows. While the class action suit filed by EFF is pending (as well as a seperate suit filed against the NSA filed by the ACLU), interested parties are taking the time to learn more about the scope of this massive invasion of privacy. Bewert examines the Narus architecture used by AT&T in their previously shadowed (and ongoing) collaboration with the NSA."

NSA and AT&T

Is anyone surprised?

Re:NSA and AT&T

Your world. Delivered...
to the NSA.

Worrisome

And not just for those people who dislike the current administartion. As has been said before, even if you approve of Bush, how will you like President (Clinton, Kerry, Gore, etc) having this same technology at their disposal. It is dangerous for any government to be able to monitor its citizens this thoroughly, no matter what the original intent might be.

Re:Worrisome

And as for their inclination to make use of power....I'm cynical enough to think that if it's there, it will be used.

With or without their knowledge. Bush happens to be one of those presidents who is more openly scornful of legal restrictions upon his behavior. In reality, we're even more at risk from unelected officials that have even fewer scruples, who are more dangerous simply because they are so hard to remove.

Re:Worrisome

.....I'm cynical enough to think that if it's there, it will be used.....

What does cynicism have to do with that? It's just human nature that guarantees that it will be used. it doesn't really matter who is in power. No government ever GIVES human rights, they only take them away, just like they do with your money.

All this monitoring of course would be a lot harder if every byte of data any computer ever sent out on the internet would automatically be encrypted. I understand that there are still some forms of encryption that are be resistant to even the kind of processing power mentioned in the article. There is some money to be made by the first person to come up with a simple, powerful, universal encryption program that works for all data and all computers or computer like devices.

Re:Worrisome

And not just for those people who dislike the current administartion. As has been said before, even if you approve of Bush, how will you like President (Clinton, Kerry, Gore, etc) having this same technology at their disposal.

I totally agree with your sentiment. But...

From TFA: this equipment was the Narus ST-6400, a machine that was capable of monitoring over 622 Mbits/second in real time in May, 2000 .

W wasn't elected until November/December 2000.

IOW, Clinton did this, not Bush. Remember Carnivore?

Re:Worrisome

FWIW, having the *ability* to tap is far different than actually using it.

And using it when authorized and overseen by a neutral, independant party such as the FISA court, or a judge is far different than claiming some absolutely crazy crap, like, "it was authorized by the AUMF" or it's an inherent power in the constitution, or it's available for any president with W as their middle initial.

As an aside, if an AUMF allows that kind of crap, then the next one ought to come just about the same time the sun turns into a red dwarf.

-Greg

Re:Worrisome

IMNSHO, a lot of W-haters are exersizing selective amnesia regarding this case.

Except that NO ONE has alleged that Clinton went around doing these things without regard to either the FISA court, or that he lied about how often he would be doing this sneaky thing.

And if you think it all started with Clinton, then I've got to tell you about this bridge near his office that he wants me to sell you. It's a historic, early 19th century suspension bridge, no less. ;)

Blaming Bush is just taking the easy way out.

Oh, yes, so the Clinton Administration was just purchasing some vast computer system, capable of datamining gobs of internet traffic ... and you don't think they were planning on using it as a wide net?

Wake up -- blaming this on anyone one administration, and certainly on any one person, is ridiculously shortsighted. Go ahead and blame it on Bush; the people that actually engineered this sort of policy, wherever they are in the NSA or various other government offices, will probably sell him down the river easily enough. Executives come and go every four or eight years, the attitudes that enable a project like this, even the raw technology itself, takes longer than that to put together.

If you give in to the temptation to blame Bush, along with all the other sheeple over at Daily Kos, you're really ignoring the majority of the problem. It's akin to seeing an iceberg in front of your ship, and sawing off the part you can see above the water and then saying the problem is gone. No it's not, all you did was get rid of the very thing that allowed you to see the problem. The thing that's going to kill you is still lurking below the water. (Ignoring the rather obvious fact that a proportionally equal amount of the iceberg would come back up out of the water as soon as you cut the top off.)

If you build a system that's capable of monitoring everyone's email, it's naive to think that it'll never be used. So the real problem here is that this system was constructed in such a way that it could be used indiscriminately, and to find an answer to why that happened, people have to be willing to look further back into the past than just G.W. Bush, something I'm not sure they're prepared to do. It's too easy and too satisfying to use something like this as political hay, rather than as the wake-up call it ought to be of how systemically out-of-control the government is, and has been for some time.

The behavior of our current and less-than-beloved President is a symptom of a problem, not its root cause.

Re:Worrisome

"IOW, Clinton did this, not Bush. Remember Carnivore?"

What makes you think it's the president's idea? Surely the NSA does what the NSA does, regardless of the person who's theoretically supposed to be telling them what to do.

People who've watched Yes Minister will know what I mean.

Or if you've been watching the UK Home Office do its "ID cards" thing regardless of which figurehead is nominally in charge of the department. People used to say that it's all David Blunkett's fault, until he left and his old department of civil servants carried on doing exactly the same thing with a new "leader".

People blame one president for what the FBI, NSA, DHS, etc. are up to, and when that president leaves, it all continues as if nothing had changed. Aren't government bureaucracies the same, the world over?

Re:Worrisome

People blame one president for what the FBI, NSA, DHS, etc. are up to, and when that president leaves, it all continues as if nothing had changed. Aren't government bureaucracies the same, the world over?

You are very much correct. In the US, we refer to it as the Military-Industrial Complex [wikipedia.org]. Some things don't change every 4 years, and the MIC is one of them. The Military-Industrial Complex is a term coined by Eisenhower to describe the entangled relationship of Congress, the Military and Big Business (industry - especially defense contractors).

I've noticed how somethings in our government really don't change. Take Cuba for example. It's been over 45 years and our policy towards Cuba hasn't changed on iota, even after all the different administrations we've been through. In fact, the military very much wanted to attack Cuba back in the 60's. After JFK was able to defuse that situation they decided to escalate Vietnam instead. You see, we need to have wars every few years in order to keep our poor defense contractors fed. We try to minimize (American) casualties, but it's very important that we bomb the hell out of some poor backwards-ass country every few years so we can test out all our cool new weapons, while using up the old ones. We can't buy too many new bombs until we use up the old ones, and how will we field-test each new generation of soldiers unless there's a real conflict to fight in? War is just a business like any other. In fact, you could say it's the engine of our whole economy. Now that you know the War in Iraq is all about buying yachts for the executives and lobbyists of Boeing, Lockheed, and other megacorps, don't you feel so much better about it? War is the American way.

Re:Worrisome

Wow, just wow, buddy you need to get out.

Our defense contractors can stay fed by selling new shit to our military, while unloading old technology on other nations. There's plenty of wars out there to keep all of them rich; there's no requirememnt to start new ones.

You believe that eh? It's like saying WallMart doesn't need to make anymore money they have enough already. Microsoft doesn't need any more advertising their market is big enough. Pull your head out of your ass man, when you have this much money it's no longer about having enough money to afford an object of your chosing, do you think these guys are saving up for a bigger pool in their backyard? If they can make more they will do evreything they can to make that happen.

field-testing new soldiers" is rather pointless, as human nature rarely changes. Training is standardized and does not decrease in effectivness. Therefore the only thing to be gained by sending soldiers to war is the development of new tactics and doctrine. However, those things tend to change from conflict to conflict anyway, so starting wars just to develop new tactics is also rather pointless.

You really have your head up your ass on this one, but let me break it down for you anyway. A Pitbull is a type of dog, this dog is known to be agressive by nature and used in dog-fights around the world. Now you may think that these people just get a dog drop it in a ring with another and let em go? No. They beat it, make it angry, provoke it, even after all this it's still not ready you know what they do? They take a little fluffy puppy and make the pitbull rip it apart, now it has the taste of blood and the confidence to kill. Now it makes the first move, now it is battle-hardened, blood and killing no longer scares it or slows it down it just wants more. This is what is happening in Iraq a country with millions of active soilders being told how wars are fought, shooting rounds of ammo in preperation for the one that will kill the other guy. After a while no amount of screaming or preperation can improve their skills as killers they have to actually kill 'a fluffy little dog'. A war they cannot lose a foe that cannot bring the wind out of their sails. They have to see their friends die as well as their enemies and the innocent. Now they go back to the millions and become heros and bring the millions of unready up to a new level, get them frothing at the mouth just waiting for 'fluffy' to rear their head up again. Now have a real core to your army. If you think uncle Sam can pick your scrawny, pale ass give him a gun and your gonna let the frags go like Quake, you would likely shit yourself before you got your first shot off and possibly go into shock when you get real brains splattered all over you.

Now I guess you think you know something really well but look over what was just said....

Where the hell do you get these ideas from?

Re:Worrisome

Having spent 20-years in the Marine Corps, let me be the first to say "You are right on target".

I just left a year and a half ago and saw combat in operation Iraqi Freedom. I can say without hesitation, the leadership has their "dicks in their hands" contemplating having a venue in which to "Train" for real. Will people die? Sure, that's never been a problem for the military. They would gladly exchange a few sons for the realism you just can't get in excercises and simulations. The military NEEDS combat veterans. Period. This is an excellent way to grow a new crop. Why the hell did we do Grenada and Panama? Mostly for the opportunity to shake the cobwebs off our war machine.

It is damned refreshing to know some people can actually see what's going on. This not to say I condone these events. I'm just attempting to validate your point of view.

Kudos!

Re:Worrisome

> they still need to advertise the new weapons, these american tv-wars are great for that.

Carl Sagan made a wry observation about exactly that, back during Iraq War I when the TV news programs were loaded with glowing reports about the Patriot interceptor missiles, "smart" bombs, etc. "[It] was a massive arms bazaar arranged by the United States to showcase some of the products that you, too, might acquire -- and only for all the critical resources of your society that might otherwise be spent on bettering your people. Line up over here!" (excerpt from the Playboy interview).

Remember the Maine

There's too much to talk about, but I think we should start calling it the Media-Military-Industrial Complex. The media is on the bandwagon now.

I wanted to comment on the AT&T Thing. Narus is company that was started in America by some ex-Israeli Defense Forces people (unit 8200 alumni) who wanted to bring their Semantic monitoring software to America to sell to big telecom. This was always security software and Israel has always been very very far ahead in that realm (because of the "realities" there. There are a lot of these companies that were formed by ex-Defense people, specificially unit 8200. Checkpoint systems is another fine example.

From this article [66.218.69.11] (direct link [cji.co.il]:

Cautious estimates indicate that in the past few years, unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30 to 40 high-tech companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall Street. This correlation between serving in the intelligence unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech companies is not coincidental:
Many of the technologies in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military technologies and were developed and improved by unit veterans.

Anyway, the original goal was to make a bundle of money selling this stuff. Why? Well, it's useful for a number of reasons. Because the internet has been "redesigned" around business and commerce (and the needs of the consumer), the nature of the network has changed. From the original decentralized network (which did use leased phone lines from Ma Bell, so it's not really decentralized from THEM), now there are huge "tier 1" trunks that carry the majority of the transcontenental data. The idea in the late ninties of "IP Network Convergence" or Voice Data Video etc. all coming out of one pipe was the big hot one. Of course, how do you make money when people are only paying for their ISP connection. Enter "usage-based billing".

The idea behind the Narus system was to create a system to track IP traffic and transactions semantically (because you still didn't know where the traffic might be coming from) and create a sort of database of records like they talked about in TFA. Like the old fashioned telcom "call records", these would record a source and target and the data transmitted. The data would only be stored if "relevant", ie: part of a usage-based service or today, "interesting" ie having actionable words or phrases, etc. Of course, then the thing in New York happened and all of a sudden there was a LOT of funding available for people who had the stuff in place or ready to go and a lot of the old red tape was struck down. Remember "karnivore?" Cohen and his more spooky cohorts made a few calls to 8200 friends (IDF and M*s*ad were working "closely" with the administration) and due to the no-bid process (not unlike that of the Iraq contractors and the Katrina and new york ground zero cleanup operations) they got the job in a sec.

Of course, AT&T is going along because they need support for the big merger with SBC (putting most of the baby bells back together. AT&T was once the largest company on earth and they are set to do it again. Guess what, voice calls are still big business and how do you think your cell phone calls go from tower to tower. You guessed it, land lines..............AT&T has always been an evil company.

Anyway, Narus is the key to everything now. The company was the one pushing for convergence from the beginning and now it's possible to monitor all traffic because it's all on IP. How convenient. Even an anonymizing proxy such as ToR cannot provide the protection you need if one of your packets happens to stray across one or more Narus points. It's a simple matter to monitor the packets and put together not only

Re:Worrisome

i have to agree that america needs war, but look at how the economy changes for the better everytime there is a war. truly their is more then likly a better solution but at the same time look what war weeds out of the country. if there was a draft wouldnt the country be completly different, no more murders on the loose all of them weilding guns in a foreign country doning what they do best. not to mention that fact that this country was born out of war. so is it even a surpise, i for one believe that war for america is a good thing

You speak of the economy as if that was the only thing we need to consider. The equation is far more complex than you make it out to be. You say it's all about the economy. I say, what about morality? What about the basic human kindness of not rampantly killing each other? Besides, war is only fun if you're winning. But you always lose eventually.

Your fantasic delusions of a crime-free society in an endless series of wars reminds me greatly of 1984 [online-literature.com]. Perhaps you should read that book.

Re:Worrisome

A lot of conservatives feel let down by Bush, for any number of reasons - growth of government, spending increases, liberalization of handling of illegal aliens, Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, the whole Gitmo thing, not practicing actual forensic science and using profiling in airport security checks out of fear of 'offending' political correctness people, limiting of peaceful protests to alloted "free speech" zones, pledging tax dollars to "economic development" abroad (effectively boosting up our own competitors), not promoting energy independence, and many other reasons.

The Republican party no longer stands for what it once did, but appears (at least at face value) be a form of liberalism of a different sort, bordering on fascism, either that or leading toward the mythical "new world order" which I used to read up on for kicks, but now after watching the Bush administration in action, now think that there may be at least some element of truth to those conspiracy theories which don't seem so crazy any more.

Thankfully some Republicans have awoken and have realized that the GOP is not what it once was.

In the next election whom do we vote for though? A big-government Democrat, or a big-government Republican, both of which seem to want to institute an Orwellian society?

Re:Worrisome

You dilemma is kind of moot. Most people don't vote on those issues. In the next election the most important issues will be moral issues where a very hard line is drawn between republicans and democrats and the war with iran (yes I said iran).

By bombing Iran Bush and flagging the abortion and gay marriage issues the republicans will be assured of a win in the next election.

Nobody cares about the size of the govt. The republican party has a sure fire button to push with their electorate who are much more alarmed with homosexual "rights" then the size of the govt.

Re:Worrisome

There will be war in Iran. It will be an air war like the once conducted by clinton. The planes will be based in Iraq and will be launched daily to drop massive bombs all over iran. All this will make for very nice TV broadcasts where there will be lots of explosions just like the movies, we will all eat it up and pat each other on the back about how we are number one.

There will not be any attempt at occupation, even bush knows by now that's a bad idea. There will be lot of killing and destruction though, we like that.

OC-192

This monitoring system does 10 gigabit a second? Wonder how much that set them back...

China - you are WAY behind

All your base really do belong to them.

wow, and I mean just fucking WOW at the processing power alone.
This thing makes echelon look like a toy.

Since I live in the UK, this kind of technology is likely to be used here as well (since we have mandated supreme data retention laws)

This is truly scary

What really bothers me

What really bothers me about all this is the President's "F**k the laws, I have a job to do" attitude. How is this any different then the attitudes of the terrorists?

We've all heard the saying: "Two wrongs don't make a right". Hasn't the Bush adminstration?

The United States is a nation of LAWS...So many of you constantly remind us of that fact whenever p2p is mentioned here...yet many of these same people believe that our President has the right to IGNORE laws he doesn't want to follow.

Why

Two words.

'Absolute power'.

A democratic government is supposed to have limited power by design. However, as they grow, they tend to cut themselves free of the shackles that their founders placed on them.
If you're going to be suprised about anything, be suprised that it didn't happen sooner.

Re:Two words.

Democracies fall because the public can be bribed.

Parliamentary governments fall because they either devolve into democracies, or they appoint a dictator because they can't get anything done.

Our constitutional republic is structured so that state governments have broader areas of control than the national government[1], but those walls have been broken down. Once it was discovered that, even though it's technically easier to influence state policy, pandering and political acts are more effective and visible at the national level the fight against constitutional restrictions began in true.

If we fall, it will be either because we have created a dictatorship or a democracy at the national level.

I believe the cure isn't better policies at the national level, it's the reaffirmation of the power of the states.

Unfortunately, a quick look at how many public-interest causes primarily lobby at the national level versus the state level is rather disenheartening.[2]

Though all may not be lost - as ideologues and ninnies have controlled the federal government, it has set up an antagonism with state and city governments. The recent movement (largely symbolic) by states and cities to forbid police cooperation with the USAPATRIOT act and - even more promising - with some aspects of the drug war[3], and issuing proclamations condemning national acts...well, it's heartening.

[1] - it's worth noting that corruption at the state and city level is many times worse than the wet dreams of the federal congress.

[2] - I don't have any direct numbers here - going off memory and a survey of some causes that I know. If anyone has better numbers....

[3] - Several states (California among them, I believe) have forbidden their officers from providing support to the DEA in drug raids. Some have done this for cannabis, as they have medical marijuana laws. Others have done it for financial reasons.

Learning to love big brother;)

Why are people so consistently surprised by this kind of news. I've come to simply expect that corporations are in full swing of subjugating the general public.

Re:Learning to love big brother;)

I've come to simply expect that corporations are in full swing of subjugating the general public.

There's a word for that system of government: Fascism.

Re:Learning to love big brother;)

There's a word for that system of government: Fascism.

I'm surprised that you haven't been modded flamebait already by the (guess who!) fascists. I'm glad you weren't modded down, because you are 100% correct.

I understand those of you who are in denial, however. The idea that America is slowly going fascist is a big, painful pill to swallow. However, the fact remains that corporations have unprecedented control of our society, and our government. Corporations are the primary institution of our time, just as capitalism is primary ideology (not democracy, that's for sure. How often do you vote? How often do you shop? Compare.) of 21st century America. Add to this unfortunate mix the shadow government in the form of the Military-Industrial Complex [wikipedia.org], and you have a recipe for the hidden hand of fascism.

I leave you with a quote from Mussolini:

"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini

Let's translate in understandable metrics shall we

The latest generation is called NarusInsight, capable of monitoring 10 billion bits of data per second.

That's 1192MB/s, not exactly what I'd call enough to monitor the entire innurnet in real time, which means somewhere along the way, AT+T must be doing some filtering, which is even sadder.

On the other hand, that's roughly 2 CD-sized full-length movies a second, so that's about 2 hours worth of pr0n per second, which means that it takes a stadium packed with 7200 naked NSA agents and a truck full of Kleenex tissues to check out all the videos in real-time...

Where's the source?

I couldn't find this software on sourceforge or freshmeat. It really troubles me that the US government is using proprietary software to violate our constitutional rights.

Conversation I overheard in a bar

Area 51. You heard of it, right? I worked out there. Most people think they've got aliens from another planet, but I didn't see any flying saucers.

Something's going on underground. I'm a pilot, which means I didn't get access to the main complex, but a lot of rock comes out of there; it's some kind of mine. But what I don't understand is why they're always laying more fiber-optic cables.

You know what I think? I think that's where the UN moved Echelon IV, back when they promised they were going to stop spying on people. They want to centralize everything -- every computer on the planet.

Also, here's an exerpt from a book I stumbled upon:

When one maniac can wipe out a city of twenty million with a microbe developed in his basement, a new approach to law enforcement becomes necessary. Every citizen in the world must be placed under surveillance. That means sky-cams at every intersection, computer-mediated analysis of every phone call, e-mail, and snail-mail, and a purely electronic economy in which every transaction is recorded and data-mined for suspicious activity.

We are close to achieving this goal. Some would say that human liberty has been compromised, but the reality is just the opposite. As surveillance expands, people become free from danger, free to walk alone at night, free to work in a safe place, and free to buy any legal product or service without the threat of fraud. One day every man and woman will quietly earn credits, purchase items for quiet homes on quiet streets, have cook-outs with neighbors and strangers alike, and sleep with doors and windows wide open. If that isn't the tranquil dream of every free civilization throughout history, what is?

(thanks W. Spector et. al.)

Re:Conversation I overheard in a bar

"As surveillance expands, people become free from danger, free to walk alone at night, free to work in a safe place, and free to buy any legal product or service without the threat of fraud."

Note that "free to dissent" doesn't appear in that list.

Re:Conversation I overheard in a bar

Hey, that's dialogue from Deus Ex!

Impressive, but AT&T can bite me

Seriously. The ISP I work for buys it's bandwidth from AT&T, but this week I'm talking to the boss about dumping them. The whole "we're going to charge Google to send data to our customers" thing was bad enough, and now we find out they're collaborating with the fucking NSA? Monitorying OUR traffic without telling us?

Screw AT&T. They aren't going to get my companies money, and I expect that I'm not the only one who is going to ditch them.

They should be sued into oblivion.

what about encryption and VPNs

I would assume that any business would set up a encrypted VPN tunnel as soon as their network was to enter the telco. So assumming that this was the case, how would this device (sitting inside the telco cloud) Monitor any of this traffic. Furthermore, I dont see how the device would be able to construct "a total network view" from within the telco even without encryption. (The firewall would block ping sweeps or other reconnasance based attacks) Joe consumer on the other hand, would not have a encrypted connection, so I think its safe to say that the sole purpose of this technology is to spy on citizens. Tor routing would provide the citizen/terrorist with encryption that would circumvent the monitoring device. So in the end, it sounds like this device is a hugely expensive monitoring device that would only catch the dumbest of dumb.

Employment on the NSA

Yes spying and everything is wrong. But with the NSA having more power than ever and needing to acquire/sift through more and more information all the time, wouldn't it be a very cool place to work.

http://www.nsa.gov/careers/ [nsa.gov] has links to all the areas. The only thing I found extraordinarily interesting is that computer programming type skills (ie Software Engineering) is more under the Computer Engineering/Electrical engineering career track than the computer science one.

The only question is that if you should decide to leave the NSA or are fired, does termination extend to more than your employment? Although seriously it does seem like a very geek friendly place to work.

Tor

Tor (http://tor.eff.org/ [eff.org]) is a good way to prevent the government (or anyone else) from watching what sites you go to.
It can be a little slow at times, but you do not need to use it all the time (unless you are very paranoid).

Mandatory link

http://narus.com/ [narus.com]

next frontier

Has anyone else been looking for the next frontier of freedom. What I mean is that for the longest time, the USA was the last frontier in freedom. If people in the world wanted to be free, they would find their way to the United States. While the USA is still more free than most places, the deterioration over the last 80 years has been notable.

Since most of the land in the world is claimed by less than free governments, I'm wondering if the next frontier in freedom needs to be sea based. I suppose for the next few decades people can probably use technologies to secure their freedoms, crypto, open source, etc..., but that won't get arround the physical controll problem. Eventually people will need to physically secure their freedoms.

Maybe the solution is for a bunch of liberty minded people to collaberate together to take controll of a small despot country, but that still would make it very vulnerable to larger military powers. Moving to more free states, juridistictions, and countries would probably help, but doen't seem like a permanent solution. Maybe it would be possible to convince all the freedom hating overloards to go somewhere else, but that seems unlikely too.

Re:next frontier

we're pretty much fucked.

Now that this is out (and Tice's info).

Look carefully at Carnivore and Calea. It was a ruse even back then. We have had the capability for quite some time to examine all the cell calls, telephone calls, and e-mails. In real-time. Undetected.

Now, think in terms of who this stuff was sold as being meant for: Al Qaeda. Do you honestly think that Al Qaeda does not have a clue about what capabilities we have? They have not trusted their regular comms for quite sometime. They go to great lengths to use either human carriers and some other very clever approachs to hiding their comms.

So then, who is this being used on? Read the so called USA PATRIOT act. It allows the passing of information from the NSA/CIA to the DOJ, that was obtained in the persuit of terrorist. That is, it allows ALL of comms that we have in country to go do the DOJ, if it was meant for find terrorists. So now, the NSA simply says that all of their information was obtianed in the persuit of terrorism, and it can be passed to the DOJ.

Great. We are busy catching bad guys. Of course, people like GWB and Karl Rove would never have access to the Democrats or Libertarians information since it is all encrypted on secure systems such as Windows. Right? We would neve expect that [wikipedia.org] our current or future [wikipedia.org] republicans [wikipedia.org] to use it to illegally futher their own goals, right? APCA

From the Narus frontpage

2006.04.05 Narus gains entry into coveted Chinese carrier market with Shanghai Telecom as first regional customer

It fits the picture quite nicely...

Better Privacy Laws

More people are starting to use the internet for their personal correspondence and business.

There are strict laws governing snail mail to protect against this very abuse we're seeing, among others. Imagine if companies, and the government, were able to know every bit of content in your snail mail? Would you be comfortable with that? What if every bit of your communication is available to the highest bidder? (a possible outcome of all this if something isn't done now)

Change the laws! Why is this information not as important as the stuff that goes on paper? Apply the same mindset that we have with the mail system towards internet traffic. I'd be fine if they recorded traffic's origin and destination, but they shouldn't lawfully have access to the *content* of my correspondence.

Technology is only going to make this oversight easier and easier. We have to educate people and change attitudes starting now.

Forget AT&T. Look at who else uses Narus...

From http://www.narus.com/customers/index.html [narus.com]:

AT&T, Brasil Telecom, KDDI, KT, KPN, Saudi Telecom, Telecom Egypt, T-Mobile, US Cellular

I must say that the Saudis using narus stuff amuses me greatly, but the rest of the list scares me. I mean, they've even got parts of Japan (KDDI) and South Korea (KT).

Watergate

Well, it seems Ol'Nixon wasn't so bad after all...

Another interesting read.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70621-0.htm l [wired.com] (Wired). An interview of a guy that works (ed?) for ATT that the EFF has subpoenaed as a witness. Talks about the physical connection made and how/when they did it.

Travel 22 years back in time!

To 1984.

Seriously though, when a country has no real threats to look at on the outside, (at least no nations as a whole), it turns it's eyes inward.

The next couple of decades are going to be interesting, as technology makes it easier and easier to spy. When and where are the lines going to be drawn in the sand?

Re:To look at it another way...

When a country is unassailable from the outside, then its enemies can only attack from the inside.

When a country is run by psychopathic liars who steal elections through rigged voting machines and who abuse the laws to ensure their continued control over the public, their enemies ARE the people.

-FL

Before there was terror, there was greed

Notice the part of the article that cites another article from 1999?

Back then they were talking about how wonderful it was to spy on everyone so some internet traffic could be charged a higher rate to be passed along.

Nearer the top of the page it mentions that previous to September 11, 2001 they wanted to analyze everything to prevent "revenue leakage", which I take to be the industry term of art meaning "a failure to exploit loopholes and monopolies to screw everyone out of every last penny".

Now they can be greedy and "patriotic".

OSI?

"And what does it monitor while looking at this 10 billion bits of IP data per second? First lets take a look at what the network model is, the OSI model of seven layers. NarusInsight focuses on two layers: number four, the transport layer, built on standards like TCP and UDP, the physical building blocks of internet data traffic, and number seven, the application layer, built on standards like HTTP and FTP, which are dependent on the application using them, i.e. Internet Explorer, Kazaa, Skype, etc."

This is where I stopped reading. Most knowledgible IT guys know that although the internet is inspired by OSI it follows a slightly different layering architecture which places the application layer in level 5. I would use TCP/UDP transport layer and application layer instead of mentioning OSI.

1984 is not a howto!

Tell your politicans that 1984 is NOT a howto!

What I'd be interested in...

What I'd be interested in is if this device does real-time packet reassembly and flow recovery. If not, what's to keep a terrorist from putting "BO" in one packet and "MB" in a following one? Or doing nasty stuff with fragmented IP packets?

Running a packet-oriented grep on a large datastream is not that hard (ie. easily solvable if you throw enough processing power at it). If the government's sniffers can reassemble packets and recover flows real-time, *then* worry.

EFF and Narus Met Back in 2001 Just After 9/11

There was not much on the mainstream news sites other than the initial news story last week so I googled ["electronic frontier foundation" narus]. The first link was to a no longer available article at siliconvalley.com. The good news is that the google cache was still there.

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:nc4cgqbKTjoJ:w ww.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/business/sp ecial_packages/security/2579675.htm+electronic+fro ntier+foundation%22+narus&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1 " [72.14.203.104]

The article appears to be a lead in for a round table discussion where both the EFF and Narus participated but I can not find the details of the conversation. Anyone else able to get their hand on it? Please post it to slashdot.

Was J. Edgar Hoover really a transvestite?

I'm not sure, but what we do know is that he liked to keep secret files on anybody who was anybody. Such files having been obtained through generally illegal eavesdropping and spying on citizens. The law specifically forbids the CIA from operating within the US and so he turned the FBI on us. Now it's the NSA. Welcome to the new age, same as the old age. This was what FISA was specifically meant to protect against. I guess our leaker-in-chief really is just Judge Dredd in disguise..."I AM the law!!!" Grr. Argh.

Narus STA 6400 - Missing web page

I read in some articles that according to papers filed with the court, they are using a piece of equipment called the Narus STA 6400. I googled for this model and the first result is the following -

NARUS Delivers Industry's Most Scalable Internet Business ...
Fully configured, the Model 6400 captures application-layer usage details via NARUS Semantic Traffic Analysis (STA) on up to six full-duplex 100 BaseT ...
www.findwealth.com/narus-delivers-industrys-most-s calable-160875pr.html - 27k - Supplemental Result - Cached - Similar pages

This page has dissapeared from the server and it can't be found in google cache. Does anyone know much about this model? What sort of processing power is behind it and what are it's capabilities? It looks to have the ability to sniff through 600 mbps each up and downstream from the snippet above, but little else is known.

Also, only this first google result seems to have relevant info on this device. If anyone here has more info, please post. A lot of us are curious, especially considering that the administration has been saying they only sniffed suspicious communications.

Ori Cohen, "33-year-old Israeli Immigrant"

Why am I not surprised? Plus his company is invested in by Walden Israel, a VC division of Walden International. Walden Israel is headed by a guy who spent five years with a company developing optics for the ISRAELI MILITARY.

Why am I not surprised?

First, an Israeli company in charge of Federal wiretapping gets caught selling wiretapping info to drug dealers in LA and the FBI gets upset over their access to Federal wiretaps.

Now this - an NSA guy and an Israeli running the company sucking data into the NSA - and the Mossad?

As I've said before, Israel has figured out that the best way to spy on people is to be the country making all the telecommo hardware and software all the other countries use to spy on people. Brilliant strategy - and it's working.

Be careful

[wetfeetl33t@localhost ~]$ traceroute www.slashdot.org | grep att.net
traceroute to www.slashdot.org (66.35.250.151), 30 hops max, 38 byte packets

[wetfeetl33t@localhost ~]$

looks like I'm OK!

Cooperation required by CALEA

AT&T's cooperation with the government in this matter is required by current FCC regulations. The FCC's authority over this derives from CALEA, the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act, a law enacted in October 1994.

The NSA *may* not be doing anything illegal - we have no way of knowing what traffic they are intercepting from the information we have available. All we know is they have the capability to intercept a broad variety of a traffic, a developement which is not particularly surprising. The rule that expanded the scope of CALEA from traditional telecom operators to Internet service providers was published by the FCC last August.

Under the Hood of AT&T's Monitoring System

When reading the article linked to please double check the writers math. While the numbers given for the capture rate are large the example seems to state that 10,000 million DSL links at a speed of 256K would be captured @ layer 4 on the 10Gbps links. My math suggests that there are aprox. 3900 DSL links @ 256Kbps each in 1Gbps,a nd therefore approx 39K @ 10Gbps. What is really missing here for me is details about the 'flow', ala Cisco NetFlow, rate per second which would effect the layer 4 processing rate. As we 'converse', i.e. traverse the tier1 transits, we send many frames in a single flow which could occur over several seconds. In a NetFlow like consideration all of such frames would comprise a single flow accounting and thus the 'data rate' to the probe, narus or otherwise, would be considerably smaller. Those tier1 transits probably do have 1000's, even 10's of 1000's of concurrent flows per second. that number is still not overwhelming as I myself have coded and operated NetFlow processing systems that process normalized records into an RDBMS at the rate of 1G records per day which is a per-second rate of under 12000 flows per second on 6x 450mhz SUN system. And I don't find Sparc to be the most powerful or processing environments! Surely the full 10Gbps per second full capture and storage of such feeds IS impressive and any such solution would have to have massive storage capacity on many storage channels opperating concurrently in order to just capture the data for later analysis. But those solutions can be purchased, just think EMC and a bunch of fiber channels. You could even experiment with this on your own DSL, or cable, by loading up ethereal and storing everything to your ata just to see that it is feasible. From there you could bypass all the cannd solution by going straight to libpcap and your homegrown code, Perl being my preference, and readily include your own indexing/tagging scheme to the data being grabbed by libpcap. So, certainly there is great issue here, however i is not one about the amount of hardware needed. I suggest a 'wire speed' collector writing to a large high speed storage with backend systems having read access to that storage for subsequent processing is rather straight forward for the 'average' homebrew.

What are U worried About?

Its the same thing over again through out history.

100 Revolution
200 Citizens get peacetime
300 Citizens get stupid and complacent
400 Givernment Goons get the upper hand
500 People die, people get upset
600 Government gets out of control
700 goto 100

-Hackus

Where's the Mainstream Media Coverage?

I did a little poking around, and Bloomberg is the only mainstream news service/news website with any stories about the EFF lawsuit or the Mark Klein statement. How come the general media hasn't picked up this story? Isn't it newsworthy that Ma Bell is being sued for colluding with an illegal government domestic spying dragnet?

Enter...the Encrypted Internet

With hardware becomming cheap It would not surprise me if EVERYTHING becomes wrapped in SSL or something like SSL within 5 (or possibly 10) years.

You can still look at traffic analysis and build models of behaviour based on throughput and other indirect data, but as long as keys remain safe and nobody manages to "hack" block ciphers with large keys I doubt anybody will be able to look inside encrypted packets (Tin Foil Hat exception: Unless the CIA/NSA/Men in Black know how!)

Boycott AT&T

AT&T is going to pay the proper price for this. How is the proper price measured? In courts where judges with certain biases decide what's right for all of us? Perhaps in some peoples' minds but not mine. The way AT&T will pay the price is by experiencing a consumer backlash that is proportional to the number of poeple outraged by this incident. Their punishment will be decided by how many people are willing to boycott their services. This is a self-regulating and just punishment. Money is all they care about, hit them where it hurts. If in the long run the company's stocks take a negligible hit then that is all that they deserve because if the average American is disinterested in his/her privacy then perhaps he or she does not deserve it.

Another view

I'm probably going to get modded troll/flamebait - but it needs to be said.

While I am not in any shape form or fashion for big brother and fascist governments, what a lot of people fail to realize is; is that the world is not really a nice place. There are a terrible lot of people with their fingers on big bombs. As much as we all would like to believe that in a totally free society we would be safe, the truth is we would not.

Things like these NSA projects save millions of lives every year. There would be no less than 12 9/11 size disasters a year in the US if it wasn't for these types of projects. Are the projects evil? It depends on your point of view. You can say that they are wrong all you want - but look at the facts - several large scale attacks have occurred even with these types of projects in place - do you really think there would be the same or less number of attacks without spying projects? Obviously there would be more - now you choose - more personal privacy AND more terrorist attacks - is that what you really want?

Re:One engineer's complaint is all it's based on..

You were assigned to the wrong crowd. We're the folks who actually get Dilbert.

[Translation for any partisan astroturfers paid to post here: slashdotters know that engineers often understand reality on the ground much better than the suits.]

Re:Spelling Nazi, sorry

Shouldn't the editors be able to fix this typo? The article is only a paragraph and might take an editor 5 seconds.

Re:Spelling Nazi, sorry

Editors? You must be new here.

Re:Spelling Nazi, sorry

At one time I lived in an alternate universe in which there were two words seperate and separate. One was a verb, and the other was an adjective.

Re:Spelling Nazi, sorry

Spelling nazism is tolerable only if the word is rather difficult and rare and has been spelled incorrectly due to ignorance of the submitter

What about spelling Republicanism rather than spelling Nazism? I think your spelling of 'insightful' deserves a good dose of that even if it isn't quite heinous enough to deserve Nazism. (Spelling Republicanism typically involves being incarcerated on property leased from foreign countries with all of your rights suspended. But it doesn't involve things like getting your fat rendered to make soap.)

Re:If you are not plotting anything illegal

Then you don't value your most fundamental right: freedom. The U.S. is founded on a very simple idea: You have the right to be left alone.

And for some follow-up reading: U.S. Constitution, Amend. 4 ;)

Re:If you are not plotting anything illegal

If I'm not doing anything illegal, then they don't need to monitor me.

What if I'm plotting to overthrow the government

by means of beating the current residents thereof in the next election?

And I dont want them to know what my plans are?

Th epower to monito citizens come with massive potential for abuse. And we all know how good our government is at avoiding temptation.

Re:Give it up.

So you don't mind the NSA noting your particular favorite form of porn?

Our main weapon is fear and surprise...

Embracing the degradation of standards and tolerating ignorance and stupidity is one of the best indicators of a truly fucked up, retrograde mentality.

The embrace and the tolerance are two indicators, not one.

You would improve the legibility of the sentence by delimiting the participle clauses with commas, particularly with regard to the repetition of the word "and".
Embracing the degradation of standards, and tolerating ignorance and stupidity, are two of the best... etc.

Re:If the Bushies have not done anything illegal

Interesting you should use that bit of nonsense. Someone pointed out the fallacy in that excuse rather well:

http://www.workingforchange.com/comic.cfm?itemid=2 0323 [workingforchange.com]

After all, if the Dubya camp are innocent, WHAT ARE THEY HIDING?

Re:Glad their monitoring terrorists

I bet those that criticize Bush will be the 1st in line to criticize him if the terrorists attack here in the USA

They say they're spying on us to defend us from terrorists. If terrorists can still attack, then who were they watching in the first place? Probably not the terrorists.

Re:Glad their monitoring terrorists

Huh? I don't know every detail of Clinton's administration, but I believe there was a good bit of Repub effort thrown into making people believe that he was some sort of underworld figure. They even started a rumor that he had murdered a former employee. So when I hear things like your IRS claim, my bullshit alarm goes off. Got any quotes to back that up?

Of course the people that criticize Bush now will be the first to criticise him if there's another attack. Why do you think they'd do anything different?

Re:Glad their monitoring terrorists

Glad their monitoring terrorists

You seem to have a problem with the English language. Are you an illegal alien by any chance? Anyone monitoring your communications would probably assume that you are.

Personally I suspect that you are an Al Quaeda operative encoding secret messages in your spelling & grammar errors.

I think you should be shot just to be on the safe side. Actually I think you should be shot for the entertainment value.