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The Hardware Behind Echelon Revealed
Whispering Bob writes "Techworld has got an interesting article on the technology behind the Echelon spying networks run by the US, UK, Cananda and Australia. Apparently the super storage and analysing technology used in the US is sold by privately owned Texas Memory Systems. It can deal with one trillion floating point operations per second. Now that's some technology."
Echelon
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Confucius (551 BC - 479 BC)
By Chris Mellor, Techworld
You've probably heard about Echelon, the vast listening system run by the US, UK, Canada and Australia that scans the world's voice traffic looking for key words and phrases.
Aside from using the system for industrial espionage and bypassing international and national laws to listen in on people, it is also used to listen out for people like Osama bin Laden and assorted terrorists in the hope of preventing attacks.
All this is out in the relative open thanks to investigative journalists and a European Commission report into the system, concerned and annoyed that the Brits and Yanks has got there first.
It works like this: The calls are recorded by geo-stationary spy satellites and listening stations, such as the UK's Menworth Hill, which combine satellite-intercepted calls and trunk landline intercepts and forward them on to centres, such as the US' Fort Meade, where supercomputers work on the recordings in real time.
But what, you ask, can deal with that overwhelming mass of data that helps our government spy on the world? And how does it work?
Well, a Texas Memory Systems SAM product - a combined solid-state disk (SSD) and DSP (digital signal processor). Woody Hutsell, an executive VP at TMS, said: "Fifty percent of our revenue this year will come from DSP systems, more than last year. The systems are a combination of SSD with DSP ASICs." ASICs are application-specific integrated circuits - chips dedicated to a specific purpose.
TMS has a TM-44 DSP chip which has 8 GFLOPS of processing power - that's eight billion floating point operations per second. The processing uses floating point arithmatic operations to supply the accuracy needed for the analysis. A DSP chip turns analogue signals from a sensor or recorder into digital information usable by a computer. Digital cameras will use a DSP to turn the light signals coming through the lens into digital picture element, or pixel, information.
A SAM-650 product is called a 192 GFLOPS DSP supercomputer by TMS. It is just 3U high and has 24 DSP chips and is positioned as a back-end number cruncher controlled by any standard server - a similar architecture to that used by Cray supercomputers. There are vast streams of information coming from recorded telephone conversations. The ability to have the DSPs work in parallel speeds up analysis enormously. Spinning hard drives can't feed the DSPs fast enough, nor are they quick enough for subsequent software analysis of the data. Consequently TMS uses its solid state technology to provide a buffer up to 32GB that keeps the DSPs operating at full speed.
A cluster of five SAM-650's provides a terra flop of processing power; one trillion floating point operations per second.
Echelon is a global surveillance network set up in Cold War days to provide the US goverment with intelligence data about Russia. One of the main contractors is Raytheon. Lockheed Martin has been involved in writing software for it. Since then it has expanded into a general listening facility, an electronic vacuum cleaner, sucking up the world's telephone conversations. Information about it's existence has been reluctantly revealed, prompted by scandals such as the recordings of Princess Diana's telephone calls by the NSA.
Recorded signals are fed into the TMS SAM systems where the DSPs filter out the noise to produce much clearer signals that software can work on to detect individual voices, perform voice recognition, and listen out for keywords, such as, for example, "Semtex". Decryption of encrypted calls is also a likely activity.
Hutsell says the SAM systems, "are supplied to intelligence agencies and the military though system integrators like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Zeta. It's an intelligence community application involving data from various sources. This is loaded into RAM and then real-time analysis is carried out on
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The ACLU has a fairly comprehensive, albeit slightly out of date, site dedicated to ECHELON.
Others are here, here, here and here . The journalistic quality varies. You might have to search for "Kenetech".
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
it really depends on how many asic's are being used. true the design costs are very high but it still becomes economically more desirable to use the asic platform as long as the production run is high enough (100K units and up). the cost of a production run asic is so low compared to fpga that even with the design costs factored in, its the less expensive way to go. that being said, it probably will not stay that way much longer; the 8 bit microcontroller market for years offered up the devices in flash for small runs or masked rom for large runs. Since the manufacturers naturally want the devices to be as inexpensive as poossible, they tend to migrate the flash devices to the smallest/newest fab technologies which brings the price down alot. We are now seeing flash devices being used for large production runs as well with the programming being handled right on the production line with the added benefits of things like chip serialization being easily handled which was difficult to do with a masked chip. This has not happened yet with FPGA's; the main reason being that FPGA's have considerably larger gate counts but even so it wont be much longer until we see FPGA's being used in all but the most price-critical and the highest volume applications where a few thousand gates and/or a few cents make the difference. a good example of this is the xm radio chipset which has a very high gate count and yet needs to be offered up in a device that will retail at $49. an FPGA would simply cost too much and be too large ad the devices get smaller and cheaper. The other reason why we have not seen more FPGA usage has to do with competition; the 8 bit market has a large number of players who are all offering up products that are in direct competition with eachother and that has naturally driven down the costs and at the same time offered up much in the way of innovation and new features. the FPGA market, while growing does not have quite the same number of players although that is changing as well. a few more years and most of the players will be producing FPGA products and thats when things will really start to get interesting.