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Data Diving

LMCO Not So Good DCMA Says

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

dcma.gif

Our freind Nick Schwellenbach over at the Project on Government Oversight dredged up a pretty damn­ing report from the Pentagon’s Defense Contract Management Agency that calls Lockheed Martin’s air­craft divi­sion to the car­pet for not keep­ing close track of costs.

Lockheed Martin, the worlds largest defense con­trac­tor, does “not pro­vide the req­ui­site def­i­n­i­tion and dis­ci­pline to prop­erly plan and con­trol com­plex, multi­bil­lion dol­lar weapon sys­tems acqui­si­tion pro­grams,” states the exec­u­tive sum­mary of a November 2007 Pentagon report obtained by the Project On Government Oversight. Questions about this report are likely to be raised this morn­ing at a Senate Armed Service Committee hear­ing on weapons acquisition.

The report by the Defense Contract Management Agency found that Lockheed Martins mil­i­tary air­craft divi­sion based in Fort Worth, Texas, is not com­pli­ant with contractually-required indus­try guide­lines for track­ing and man­ag­ing costs called the “Earned Value Management System.” EVMS helps con­trac­tors and the gov­ern­ment spot poten­tial cost prob­lems before they bal­loon out of con­trol. This April the GAO reported $295 bil­lion in cost growth for the 95 major weapons sys­tems it reviewed bring­ing their esti­mated total price tag to $1.6 trillion.

The report will be high­lighted today at a hear­ing of the Senate Armed Services Committee which will ask ques­tions about “acqui­si­tion of major defense weapons sys­tems” of John Young — who needs no intro­duc­tion — and Katherine Schinasi, the GAO’s Managing Director of Acquisition and Sourcing Management (what­ever the heck that means)…Our boy Colin Clark will be there to hear what’s what and he’ll have some follow-up gouge for you on what goes on.

The decline of Pentagon and con­trac­tor empha­sis on EVMS was an unin­tended con­se­quence of 1990s acqui­si­tion reform, Dr. James I. Finley, the Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, told POGO. EVM is get­ting more atten­tion through­out indus­try now that the DoD is stress­ing compliance.

Ouch…

– Christian

Posted in Data Diving | 8 Comments »

New Spy Chief’s “Total Information” Ties

Friday, January 5th, 2007

“John Michael McConnell, the retired vice admi­ral slated to become America’s new top spy, [has some] long­time asso­ci­a­tions [which] may cause him headaches dur­ing Senate con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings,” Newsweek.com notes.“One such tie is with another for­mer Navy admi­ral, John Poindexter, the Iran-contra fig­ure who started the con­tro­ver­sial ‘Total Information Awareness’ pro­gram at the Pentagon in 2002.”
iaologo.gif


The inter­na­tional con­sul­tancy that McConnell has worked at for a decade as a senior vice pres­i­dent, Booz Allen Hamilton, won con­tracts worth $63 mil­lion on the TIA “data-mining” pro­gram, which was later can­celled [kinda sorta — ed.] after con­gres­sional Democrats raised ques­tions about inva­sion of pri­vacy… While his role in the TIA pro­gram is unlikely to derail McConnell’s nom­i­na­tion, spokes­peo­ple for some lead­ing Democratic sen­a­tors such as Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Ron Wyden of Oregon say it will be exam­ined care­fully.
McConnell was a key fig­ure in mak­ing Booz Allen, along with Science Applications International Corp., the prime con­trac­tor on the project, accord­ing to offi­cials in the intel­li­gence com­mu­nity and at Booz Allen who would dis­cuss con­tracts for data min­ing only on con­di­tion of anonymity because of the sen­si­tiv­ity of the sub­ject. “I think Poindexter prob­a­bly respected Mike and prob­a­bly entrusted the TIA pro­gram to him as a result,” said a long­time asso­ciate of McConnell’s who worked at NSA with him…
Intel experts agree that McConnell will need all the good will he can get from the intel­li­gence and defense com­mu­ni­ties. “It’s a good appoint­ment for a bad office,” says John Arquilla, who teaches intel­li­gence at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “The direc­torate of national intel­li­gence should not exist. It’s very redun­dant.” Insiders say Negroponte was frus­trated by his lack of bud­get­ing con­trol over Pentagon intel­li­gence, and the resis­tance of the CIA to his direc­tion since his office was cre­ated in 2004 as part of the Bush administration’s post-9/11 reforms.

And by the way, Rutty asks in the com­ments (I’m para­phras­ing heav­ily here): What was McConnell’s role in Echelon — the NSA’s mas­sive infor­ma­tion sweeper, which got some much atten­tion dur­ing the Clinton years? (The project had been around for decades, remember.)

Posted in Cloak and Dagger, Data Diving, You can run... | 28 Comments »

Data Diver Disses Terror-Mining

Tuesday, December 12th, 2006

Jeff Jonas is one of the country’s lead­ing prac­ti­tion­ers of the dark art of data analy­sis. Casino chiefs and gov­ern­ment spooks alike have used his CIA-funded “Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness” soft­ware to scour data­bases for hid­den con­nec­tions.
nyt_mag_terror_diagram.jpgSo you’d think that Jonas would be all into the idea of using these data-mining sys­tems to pre­dict who the next ter­ror­ist attacker might be.
Think again. “Though data min­ing has many valu­able uses, it is not well suited to the ter­ror­ist dis­cov­ery prob­lem,” he writes in a new study, co-authored with the Cato Institute’s Jim Harper. “This use of data min­ing would waste tax­payer dol­lars, need­lessly infringe on pri­vacy and civil lib­er­ties, and mis­di­rect the valu­able time and energy of the men and women in the national secu­rity com­mu­nity.” Are you lis­ten­ing, NSA?
Jonas doesn’t have a prob­lem cob­bling together infor­ma­tion on sus­pects from var­i­ous data­bases. It’s using these data­bases to fore­cast a terrorist’s behav­ior — think mar­ket research, but for Al-Qaeda — that Jonas hates. “The pos­si­ble ben­e­fits of pre­dic­tive data min­ing for find­ing plan­ning or prepa­ra­tion for ter­ror­ism are min­i­mal. The finan­cial costs, wasted effort, and threats to pri­vacy and civil lib­er­ties are poten­tially vast,” he writes.

One of the fun­da­men­tal under­pin­nings of pre­dic­tive data min­ing in the com­mer­cial sec­tor is the use of train­ing pat­terns. Corporations that study con­sumer behav­ior have mil­lions of pat­terns that they can draw upon to pro­file their typ­i­cal or ideal con­sumer. Even when data min­ing is used to seek out instances of iden­tity and credit card fraud, this relies on mod­els con­structed using many thou­sands of known exam­ples of fraud per year.
Terrorism has no sim­i­lar indi­cia. With a rel­a­tively small num­ber of attempts every year and only one or two major ter­ror­ist inci­dents every few yearseach one dis­tinct in terms of plan­ning and exe­cu­tion­there are no mean­ing­ful pat­terns that show what behav­ior indi­cates plan­ning or prepa­ra­tion for ter­ror­ism. Unlike con­sumers shop­ping habits and finan­cial fraud, ter­ror­ism does not occur with enough fre­quency to enable the cre­ation of valid pre­dic­tive mod­els. Predictive data min­ing for the pur­pose of turn­ing up ter­ror­ist plan­ning using all avail­able demo­graphic and trans­ac­tional data points will pro­duce no bet­ter results than the highly sophis­ti­cated com­mer­cial data min­ing done today [with results in the low single-digits ed.]. The one thing pre­dictable about pre­dic­tive data min­ing for ter­ror­ism is that it would be con­sis­tently wrong.
Without pat­terns to use, one fall­back for ter­ror­ism data min­ing is the idea that any anom­aly may pro­vide the basis for inves­ti­ga­tion of ter­ror­ism plan­ning. Given a typ­i­cal American pat­tern of Internet use, phone call­ing, doc­tor vis­its, pur­chases, travel, read­ing, and so on, per­haps all out­liers merit some level of inves­ti­ga­tion. This the­ory is offen­sive to tra­di­tional American free­dom, because in the United States every­one can and should be an out­lier in some sense. More con­cretely, though, using data min­ing in this way could be worse than search­ing at ran­dom; ter­ror­ists could defeat it by act­ing as nor­mally as pos­si­ble.
Treating anom­alous behav­ior as sus­pi­cious may appear sci­en­tific, but, with­out pat­terns to look for, the design of a search algo­rithm based on anom­aly is no more likely to turn up ter­ror­ists than twist­ing the end of a kalei­do­scope is likely to draw an image of the Mona Lisa.

Civil lib­er­tar­i­ans and blog­gers have talked ’til they’re blue in the face about how lame this kind of terror-predicting is. But I don’t think I’ve ever heard a giant of the field, like Jonas, come out against the prac­tice — at least not on-the-record. Let’s hope this is one con­ver­sa­tion that the feds are mon­i­tor­ing.
(Big ups: Daou)
UPDATE 11:49 AM: Shane Harris here. Die-hard pro­po­nents of pattern-based ‘data min­ing’ to catch ter­ror­ists will remain uncon­vinced by Jonas’ and Harper’s argu­ment. While it’s true that data min­ing in the com­mer­cial sec­tor is based upon “train­ing pat­terns,” back­ers of sys­tems such as Total Information Awareness will say, yes, and that’s why data min­ing for ter­ror­ists has to start with hun­dreds — maybe thou­sands — of known or poten­tial ter­ror­ist pat­terns to look for. A major part of TIA research was the cre­ation of ter­ror­ist attack tem­plates through red team­ing exer­cises, in which experts were paid to come up with devi­ous and clan­des­tine plots that a ter­ror­ist might con­ceiv­ably attempt. Their var­i­ous machi­na­tions would, pre­sum­ably, leave a set of dig­i­tal foot­prints — air­line tick­ets pur­chased, money wired, hotels paid for, and so on — and THAT data would be mined for clues.
What’s also inter­est­ing about this paper is the com­bi­na­tion of the authors. Jim Harper is a well-known and artic­u­late activist, and has long since staked out cen­tral ter­ri­tory in the secu­rity vs. pri­vacy debate. But Jonas has stayed out of pol­i­tics. Indeed, those who’ve met him will know that he sticks out like a sore West coast thumb among Washington gear heads, being unafraid to use the word “dude” in for­mal con­ver­sa­tion and hap­pily acknowl­edg­ing his igno­rance of most Beltway insider base­ball. But those who know Jonas and have heard him speak about elec­tronic ter­ror­ist hunt­ing know that, like his co-author Harper, he has a strong lib­er­tar­ian streak. Maybe Jonas wouldn’t put it quite that way — dude — but it’s there.

Posted in Cloak and Dagger, Data Diving, Info War, You can run... | 41 Comments »

Traveling Americans Get Terrorism Score

Friday, November 3rd, 2006

Do you know your offi­cial ter­ror­ism score? U.S. Customs agents will with a new data­base sys­tem that uses algo­rithms to fig­ure out which inter­na­tional trav­ellers war­rant closer search.
The sys­tem, announced in the Federal Register today, is called the Automated Targeting System, which will use the Treasury’s watch­list (.pdf), data pro­vided to it by the air­lines, your I-94 form and other data sources to com­pute your ter­ror­ism risk when you cross the bor­der.
Here’s what I had to say over at 27B/6:

The data — which includes all the infor­ma­tion you give to an air­line such as med­ical con­di­tions, fre­quent flier num­ber, spe­cial meal requests, home and email addresses, pay­ment infor­ma­tion and your travel agent’s names — will be held for up to 40 years. The data can be shared with any gov­ern­ment agency or local law enforce­ment agency for civil or crim­i­nal mat­ters, and can even be shared with for­eign gov­ern­ments as data to test other data-mining pro­grams, even ones not related to bor­der secu­rity.
What hap­pens if you have a name that’s sim­i­lar to a sus­pected ter­ror­ist or drug smug­gler? Conceivably, you could have your car torn apart every time you drive to Canada or have a blue-gloved agent check­ing your anus for dope every time you go to Cancun.
But surely, you’ll be able to rem­edy such mis­takes using the Privacy Act, which pre­vents secret data­bases? Actually, no.

Full story and links to other blog­gers here.
Hat Tip: JQP
On another note: This post con­cludes my week-long takeover of DefenseTech. Thanks for humor­ing me over here at Noah’s house. It’s been quite fun and I’m jeal­ous of his great read­ers, tip­pers and com­menters. He’ll return soon, but feel free to stop by my blog-house occa­sion­ally.
- Ryan Singel

Posted in Data Diving | 35 Comments »

Military Ballots’ Privacy Risks

Wednesday, November 1st, 2006

American troops could be putting their most per­sonal infor­ma­tion at risk — just by vot­ing in next week’s elec­tions.
Members of the armed forces, sta­tioned over­seas, can cast their vote with a Federal Write In Absentee Ballot, or FWAB, if they can’t get one from their local elec­tion boards. But that fed­eral bal­lot, “Standard Form 186 (Oct 95),” comes with a major pri­vacy risk, at least in some edi­tions. The bal­lot has to be mailed in a spe­cial return enve­lope, in order to be prop­erly processed. On mil­i­tary bases in the Pacific, Special Form 186 requires a ser­vice mem­ber to include his address, social secu­rity num­ber, date of birth, and sig­na­ture on the out­side of that enve­lope.
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In other words, every­thing needed to steal a sol­dier or sailor’s iden­tity is on pub­lic dis­play, for any­one to see (full pics: back, front). .
“You’d think the peo­ple run­ning this pro­gram would’ve noticed. It’s a joke they didn’t, and it’s obvi­ous no one was pay­ing atten­tion,” a Navy avi­a­tion elec­tri­cian, attached to the 7th Fleet, tells Defense Tech.
Online edi­tions of the FWAB seem to be more security-conscious, warn­ing ser­vice­mem­bers “NOT [to] WRITE ANY PERSONAL IDENTIFYING INFORMATION ON THE ENVELOPE” — an enve­lope that’s largely blank.
But the paper bal­lots aren’t the only source of pri­vacy con­cerns in the mil­i­tary vot­ing sys­tem. An e-mail bal­lot­ing pro­gram has been called into ques­tion, for using unen­crypted data. “E-mail traf­fic can flow through equip­ment owned and oper­ated by var­i­ous gov­ern­ments, com­pa­nies and indi­vid­u­als in many coun­tries,” the Washington Post quotes an August report pre­pared for the Pentagon as say­ing. “It is eas­ily mon­i­tored, blocked and sub­ject to tam­per­ing.”
But even eas­ier to mon­i­tor is a paper bal­lot, with per­sonal data scrawled right on the out­side of the enve­lope. Which is why the Navy avi­a­tion elec­tri­cian refused to use the form.
“I wasn’t the only per­son who didn’t send the bal­lot in. It wasn’t worth the risk,” he notes. “I gave some money to the can­di­dates instead.”
UPDATE 7:02 AM: What are the absen­tee bal­lots like where you’re sta­tioned? Tell us here or write in.

Posted in Data Diving, You can run... | 3 Comments »

Citizen’s Guide to Getting the Goods

Monday, October 30th, 2006

The Freedom of Information Act isn’t just for jour­nal­ists or activist groups — cit­i­zens (with and with­out blogs) can also peti­tion the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to turn over doc­u­ments. While it’s rather sim­ple to file a request, it’s a bit more com­pli­cated to file one that actu­ally gets you infor­ma­tion.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which hired two of the best FOIA fil­ers in the coun­try this sum­mer, just updated its legal guide for blog­gers with a FOIA primer.

How do I know what to ask for?

News arti­cles, gov­ern­ment reports, press releases, and Congressional hear­ings are good start­ing points for think­ing up FOIA request ideas.

How do I make a FOIA request?

You can make a FOIA request by mail­ing or fax­ing a let­ter to the agency. You may also be able to sub­mit your request by email. Check the agency’s web site for infor­ma­tion about how and where to send requests.

Are there any step-by-step guides for writ­ing and sub­mit­ting FOIA requests?

Yes. Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press has pub­lished a guide called How To Use the Federal FOI Act, and also has a FOI Letter Generator. The National Security Archive also has help­ful guid­ance for FOIA requesters.

It’s a bit sim­pli­fied since gov­ern­ment agen­cies vary widely in their atti­tude towards requests. The best advice is to make your request very nar­row. Ask for a report by name (for instance, ask for the Pentagon’s Inspector General’s report on the Iraqi National Congress), instead of ask­ing for all agency records about Chalabi and the INC. (BTW, there’s a good pos­si­bil­ity that report exists and hasn’t been pub­lished).
Another fun place to start would be to fol­low on Michael Ravnitzky’s FOIA work, which unearthed the indexes to four inter­nal NSA pub­li­ca­tions, whose arti­cles have tan­ta­liz­ing titles like “Was a Cryptologic Corporal.” All you have to do is look through the indexes, find a title or two that inter­ests you and ask for it. You just might get it.
Another place to get inspired is Russ Kick’s The Memory Hole, a col­lec­tion of doc­u­ments he’s built with FOIA requests he’s filed after read­ing news arti­cles. For instance, he’s the one who got offi­cial pic­tures of the coffins of sol­diers killed in Iraq when they landed at Dover Air Force base, after the pho­tog­ra­phy ban was debated in the news.
You could be charged a small amount, but gen­er­ally if it’s going to be more than $25 dol­lars or so in fees, the agency will let you know.
And if an agency stonewalls you or ignores you, well, you can either sue your­self (not a good idea and even if you win, you don’t get attorney’s fees) or ask a group like EPIC or the First Amendment Center or a pub­lic inter­est law clinic to help.
Think of it like a let­ter to the edi­tor or your con­gress crit­ter, it’s some­thing every cit­i­zen should try at least once.
On an unre­lated note, I’m pretty hon­ored that Noah handed me the keys and I’ll likely be focus­ing mostly on anti-terrorism and gov­ern­ment data­base stuff since that’s my nor­mal beat.
But keep the tips and com­ments com­ing and together we’ll keep DefenseTech hum­ming while Noah racks up speed­ing tick­ets in 10 dif­fer­ent states.
– Ryan Singel

Posted in Data Diving | 1 Comment »

LifeLog Trials Begin

Wednesday, May 17th, 2006

Those kooky, possibly-creepy defense pro­grams are awfully hard to kill. Take LifeLog, Darpa’s con­tro­ver­sial project to archive almost every­thing about peo­ple — where they’ve gone, what they’ve said, how they’re feel­ing. The agency seemed to pull the plug on the pro­gram, after some pesky reporters started look­ing into it. But seven months later, large por­tions of the elec­tronic diary effort were back, under a new name: Advanced Soldier Sensor Information System and Technology, or ASSIST.
06MSEL015_soldsens01_LR.jpgNow, Darpa is show­ing its LifeLog ASSIST handy­work off, at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. Soldiers there, wear­ing a ton of cam­eras and sen­sors, are going on mock-patrol through a sim­u­lated Iraqi vil­lage — and record­ing the whole thing.

The sen­sors are expected to cap­ture, clas­sify and store such data as the sound of accel­er­a­tion and decel­er­a­tion of vehi­cles, images of peo­ple (includ­ing sus­pi­cious move­ments that might not be seen by the sol­diers), speech and spe­cific types of weapon fire.
A capac­ity to give GPS loca­tions, an abil­ity to trans­late Arabic signs and text into English, as well as on-command video record­ing also are being demon­strated in Aberdeen. Sensor sys­tem soft­ware is expected to extract key­words and cre­ate an indexed mul­ti­me­dia rep­re­sen­ta­tion of infor­ma­tion col­lected by dif­fer­ent sol­diers. For com­par­i­son pur­poses, the sol­diers wear­ing the sen­sors will make an after-action report based on mem­ory and then sup­ple­ment that after-action report with infor­ma­tion learned from the sen­sor data.

(Big ups: Boing Boing)

Posted in Data Diving, You can run... | No Comments »

Watch List Snags Fellow Feds

Thursday, May 4th, 2006

How bad are the feds’ enemy-of-the-state data­bases? So bad, they can’t even keep fel­low terror-hunters off their black­lists, Ryan Singel reports.
airlinetoy7.jpgThe Transportation Security Administration’s air­line screen­ing sys­tem “tends to mis­take gov­ern­ment employ­ees and U.S. ser­vice­men for for­eign ter­ror­ists,” he writes in today’s Wired News. “Newly released gov­ern­ment doc­u­ments show that even hav­ing a high-level secu­rity clear­ance won’t keep you off the Transportation Security Administration’s Kafkaesque ter­ror­ist watch list, where you’ll suf­fer missed flights and bureau­cratic nightmares.”

According to logs from the TSA’s call cen­ter from late 2004 — which black out the names of indi­vid­u­als to pro­tect their pri­vacy — the watch list has snagged…
* A high-ranking gov­ern­ment employee with a better-than-top-secret clear­ance who is also a U.S. Army Reserve major…
* An active-duty Army offi­cer who had served four com­bat tours (includ­ing one in Afghanistan) and who holds a top-secret clear­ance.
* A retired U.S. Army offi­cer and antiterrorism/force-protection offi­cer with exper­tise on weapons of mass destruc­tion who was snared when he was put back on active-duty sta­tus while fly­ing on a ticket paid for by the Army.

Now, I’m sure there have been improve­ments to the watch lists since 2004. But, as
Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine told Congress ear­lier this week, data­base man­agers still “had not ensured that the infor­ma­tion in that data­base is com­plete and accu­rate. For exam­ple, the OIG found instances where the con­sol­i­dated data­base did not con­tain names that should have been included on the watch list and inac­cu­rate or incon­sis­tent infor­ma­tion related to per­sons included in the database.”

The OIG’s June 2005 report offered 40 rec­om­men­da­tions to the TSC [Terrorist Screening Center] to address areas such as data­base improve­ments, data accu­racy and com­plete­ness, call cen­ter man­age­ment, and staffing. The TSC gen­er­ally agreed with the rec­om­men­da­tions and in some cases pro­vided evi­dence that it has taken action to cor­rect the weak­nesses that the audit iden­ti­fied.
Since issuance of the audit, the TSC has ini­ti­ated a record-by-record review of the ter­ror­ist screen­ing data­base to ensure accu­racy, com­plete­ness, and con­sis­tency of the records. TSC staff informed the OIG it is focus­ing first on the records deemed most impor­tant. According to the TSC, review of the entire data­base, which con­tains more than 235,000 [uh, make that 325,000] records, will take sev­eral years.

UPDATE 9:57 AM: Slashdot sez, “The Guardian news­pa­per has a great story about how the gath­er­ing of infor­ma­tion for ‘anti-terrorist’ pas­sen­ger screen­ing data­bases allowed a reporter and secu­rity guru Adam Laurie to lay the ground­work for steal­ing the iden­tity of a busi­ness trav­eller by using his dis­carded boarding-pass stub.”

Posted in Data Diving, Homeland Security | No Comments »

Stroke Me, Stroke Me

Friday, April 28th, 2006

Oh, this is gonna be good. Ryan Singel, the man behind a zil­lion data-mining scoops, and cracker-legend-turned-editor Kevin Poulsen have teamed up for a new blog over at Wired News. 27B Stroke 6 (named for Brazil’s most famous form) will “scare peace-loving peo­ple with phan­toms of lost lib­erty, in a daily brief­ing on secu­rity, free­dom and pri­vacy in the wired world,” accord­ing to Poulsen. I can’t wait.

Posted in Data Diving | No Comments »

How AT&T Helped the NSA Snoop

Saturday, April 8th, 2006

wiretap.jpgRyan Singel has him­self a big, fat scoop. We already knew that tele­com com­pa­nies were coop­er­at­ing with the NSA to eaves­drop on domes­tic and inter­na­tional com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Now, Ryan reveals how it was done.

AT&T pro­vided National Security Agency eaves­drop­pers with full access to its cus­tomers’ phone calls, and shunted its cus­tomers’ inter­net traf­fic to data-mining equip­ment installed in a secret room in its San Francisco switch­ing cen­ter, accord­ing to a for­mer AT&T worker…
According to a state­ment released by Klein’s attor­ney, an NSA agent showed up at the San Francisco switch­ing cen­ter in 2002 to inter­view a management-level tech­ni­cian for a spe­cial job. In January 2003, Klein observed a new room being built adja­cent to the room hous­ing AT&T’s #4ESS switch­ing equip­ment, which is respon­si­ble for rout­ing long dis­tance and inter­na­tional calls…
“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.
The split cir­cuits included traf­fic from peer­ing links con­nect­ing to other inter­net back­bone providers, mean­ing that AT&T was also divert­ing traf­fic routed from its net­work to or from other domes­tic and inter­na­tional providers, accord­ing to Klein’s state­ment.
The secret room also included data-mining equip­ment called a Narus STA 6400, “known to be used par­tic­u­larly by gov­ern­ment intel­li­gence agen­cies because of its abil­ity to sift through large amounts of data look­ing for pre­pro­grammed targets.”

UPDATE 04/10/06 9:10 AM: Lots more on Naurus’ data-sniffing prod­ucts here, includ­ing one “capa­ble of mon­i­tor­ing 10 bil­lion bits of data per second.”

Posted in Data Diving, You can run... | 42 Comments »

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