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.