Naris

[AZRedhawk44]

Anyone heard of this?

http://rt.com/usa/news/surveillance-spying-e-mail-citizens-178/


I've heard of Carnivore, and Room 641a.  Never Naris though.

[brimic]

This sounds far worse than Carnivore.
Carnivore, iirc, simply sifted out electronic communications that had certain keywords or patterns in them.
This stores everything.
If you become a target of the state, it would be very easy for them to pull up all of your past electronic communications and make a case to 'disappear' you or put you in gitmo indefinately.


  Every day it seems that we are seeing more and more pieces of the puzzle revealed to us, and that .gov has been gearing up for something big.

[mtnbkr]

Big Data.  That's the new thing in Information Management.

Chris

[Ben]

Big Data.  That's the new thing in Information Management.

Chris

Yup. A lot of it is ease of use and a lot is, "we've got the capacity, so why not"? At work we used to have a pretty small email server and used Thunderbird, so you would be forced at some point to either delete emails or move them to local mail. Now we're on Google Government Gmail, with practically unlimited capacity. Hardly anyone bothers to clean out their mail anymore.

I was just part of a FOIA, and because I still try to keep my email in order (partially because I'm paranoid) I ended up with a couple hundred emails to submit. One of the other people in the FOIA had 4000(!!!) emails to submit over the same time period because he had no reason to clean up his emails, so the search algorithm found tons of flagged keywords in his account.

Google and "The Cloud" in general make our online lives easier, but at the same time it's kinda scary to think about all your info sitting "out there" with information stored looking like it's never going to surpass increases in storage capacity. Especially considering how few people pre-encrypt before they store stuff on the cloud, because, hey, The Cloud encrypts for you!

[purequackery]

RT should know about Narus devices in secret rooms at AT&T facilities.  It's years old news.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narus_(company)
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/04/70619

[RoadKingLarry]

RT should know about Narus devices in secret rooms at AT&T facilities.  It's years old news.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narus_(company)
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/04/70619

There are several discrepancies in the 2nd link that might raise an eyebrow.

an NSA agent showed up at the San Francisco switching center in 2002 to interview a management-level technician for a special job.

at&t is a union shop, you are either management or a technician (craft) there is no "management-level technicians"

"While doing my job, I learned that fiber optic cables from the secret room were tapping into the Worldnet (AT&T's internet service) circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal," Klein wrote.

Fiber optics don't work that way. You can repeat a signal, you can mix it with other signals, you can drop out specific packets, (ADM) you could even send duplicate packets to separate destinations but you can't siphon off "some of the light". It's always TX to RX not TX to RX1 and RX2.

Not saying it couldn't be done or that it didn't/isn't happening but not the way the 6 year old article described it

[birdman]

Fiber optics don't work that way. You can repeat a signal, you can mix it with other signals, you can drop out specific packets, (ADM) you could even send duplicate packets to separate destinations but you can't siphon off "some of the light". It's always TX to RX not TX to RX1 and RX2.

Not saying it couldn't be done or that it didn't/isn't happening but not the way the 6 year old article described it

Yes you can, It's called a splitter.  And we have had N-way splitters since before we had WDM and DWDM.

[mtnbkr]

at&t is a union shop, you are either management or a technician (craft) there is no "management-level technicians"

So is Verizon.  When I worked there, I was an IT Engineer and didn't manage anyone, but I was technically "management".  IIRC, that label was applied to anyone not covered by union rules.  So, a "management-level technician" is either a technical manager (managed other techs) or just an engineer-type who was classified as "management".

Chris

[RoadKingLarry]

Yes you can, It's called a splitter.  And we have had N-way splitters since before we had WDM and DWDM.

Not used by AT&T on any of the equipment I work on. I haven't seen it all or worked on everything AT&T uses but I have worked in big offices that have the type of equipment described in the article referenced.

[RoadKingLarry]

So is Verizon.  When I worked there, I was an IT Engineer and didn't manage anyone, but I was technically "management".  IIRC, that label was applied to anyone not covered by union rules.  So, a "management-level technician" is either a technical manager (managed other techs) or just an engineer-type who was classified as "management".

Chris

Differences in terminology. Either way union rules would allow a grievance if management was doing actual craft level work. genreally the bigger the city/local the more rabid the unionistas are about such things.
I'm not saying the things described didn't happen but the articles description of events don't jibe with reality. Which isn't terribly surprising given the state of "journalism".

[RevDisk]

Some mistakes. It's Narus. Who make high speed deep packet inspection boxes.  Other boxes are for high speed retention without near real time inspection. 

Carnivor was just a packet sniffer and not hugely impressive. Tho, with DCS2000 and CALEA, real time  intercepts are about what the tin foil folks think it is. 

Btw, project name is Stellar Wind.  Just collecting data, mostly. Little real time stuff.  NSA previously mostly kept out of this sort of stuff.  Not sure why they are positioning themselves to try to blackmail everyone.  I thought it was neo-con world domination crap project, but no idea these days.  They're setting themselves up for a fall when the politicians fully understand that the NSA will eat their lunch. Hell, some of the military is leery now. All the blackmail in the world doesn't help much if your SAN eats a JDAM. 

Am drunk, think.

Fiber optics don't work that way. You can repeat a signal, you can mix it with other signals, you can drop out specific packets, (ADM) you could even send duplicate packets to separate destinations but you can't siphon off "some of the light". It's always TX to RX not TX to RX1 and RX2.

Not saying it couldn't be done or that it didn't/isn't happening but not the way the 6 year old article described it

Na.  Easy as hell. We've been doing it for decades. Our subs have tapped plenty of fiber.  It was tricky until some engineer made a joint thingie that was copies from tennis ball. But they use a proper splitter at the telco. No hot splice.

[brimic]

NSA previously mostly kept out of this sort of stuff.  Not sure why they are positioning themselves to try to blackmail everyone.  I thought it was neo-con world domination crap project, but no idea these days.  They're setting themselves up for a fall when the politicians fully understand that the NSA will eat their lunch. Hell, some of the military is leery now. All the blackmail in the world doesn't help much if your SAN eats a JDAM. 

Rev, If you are coming to that line of thinking, drunk or not, then this stuff worries me a lot more...

[RoadKingLarry]

Na.  Easy as hell. We've been doing it for decades. Our subs have tapped plenty of fiber.  It was tricky until some engineer made a joint thingie that was copies from tennis ball. But they use a proper splitter at the telco. No hot splice.

We (at&t) don't use fiber splitters in the COs.
It's just easier to drop out what you want to look at at a MUX and send it along after you've looked at it. No reason to introduce unnecessary losses in the path. Telcos don't need to be all sneaky about it, .gov says give 'em access .gov gets access

I don't know about tapping undersea fiber for decades but certainly more than A decade.
Tapping undersea copper was old hat by the time I got to deploy to those places.

http://cryptome.org/nsa-fibertap.htm