Slashdot Mirror
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."
Hm.
9 9940.nsa_2_.xml.pdf
1 Tflops would place it anywhere between place 240 (if it were sustained) or 500+ (if it were peak) on the current top500.
Not THAT amazing.
Also, i dont quite realize how important floating point ops are in a data-warehousing application. They just pile up tons of (faxes/emails/phone recording).
Btw: Remember the story about the 5MW wind-generator a few weeks ago?
The company cant sell in the us because echelon was used to sniff fax messages that were later given to a us company (kenetech windpower) which made a patent. Complete with the original tying errors. (who was it again who said "whats good for boeing is good for america"?)
(story from ZEIT, titles "treason between friends", here http://hermes.zeit.de/pdf/archiv/archiv/1999/40/1
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
What ? The US spy department still relies on ASICs ?
Don't they heard of FPGAs ?!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
If enough people made phonecalls that were dilliberately saturated with keywords (say a few million at once)
Would it be possible to effectively slashdot their supercomputer? >:P
Wondering just what Echelon is looking for?
The word lists used by Echelon are highly classified (which of course makes sense if the goal is to keep people such as terrorists from knowing what words to avoid using). However, this also means that public oversight is impossible. Some information does get leaked to us outsiders from time to time, but always as unconfirmable rumors.
Here's a few of those that seem likelyest to have at least a grain of truth.
1. Echelon lists include lots of specific words that are used by people with training, and few general words widely used by the public. Words such as "Explosive" or phrases such as "Blow Up" won't get a hit, but more specific terms, i.e. "PETN", or "Semtex", may be on the list.
2. The list is updated, both by a general review board every few months, and immediately if a particular concern warrents it. (This rummor is apperently the only thing about the system that has been officially confirmed by testimony before congress in an open session).
3. The list is largely focused on detecting Nuclear weapons tech. It looks for correct technical names of bomb components, among other things. Lately, this has been expanded to focus more on bio-weapons.
4. The list includes names of some public officials. Rumor has it that Attourny Generals and FBI and CIA directors have had their names placed on the list to help protect them. Janet Reno was supposedly kept on the list for a year after she left office because of concerns right-wing U.S. domestic terrorists were especially likely to target her. People running the system are reluctant to put public figures on the list, because they get too many false positives to wade through.
5. The system looks for multiple hits and grades them algorythmicly. Several entries in the same phone call, particularly entries that are logically related, will add up to a conversation that crosses a critical threshold and is brought to the attention of a human supervisor.
It's easy to see some ways this could be abused. For example, it could be used to help protect all the presidential candidates in an election year, but just looking for the candidate's last names would generate billions of fales positives. So, in order to 'protect' all the candidates, it would be necessary to monitor for less well known information, like the names of various campaign advisors, private addresses, or other such info, which would give the people running the system a lot of leeway in listening to calls made by the opposition during their run for the office.
Who is John Cabal?
I'm curious, what Echelon can do with Freenet? Or SSH traffic? Or IPSex? Or SSL? Or GPG email? Does it work only on clear-text communication? I suppose not because that would be utterly foolish. With VoIP it's now trivial to have encrypted voice communication all over the world. What can Echelon do about such traffic?
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
In the late 1970's I worked for a defense contractor that built specialized signal processing computers. The NSA was a major customer. We tried to find other applications, like oil and gas exploration, but nobody else was buying.
My job was to write microcode assemblers and then write the microcode that handled I/O. My description of the hardware is here.
Up to 24 voice grade channels (8K samples per second each) arrived time and/or frequency multiplexed onto a single data channel. The system detected the presence of the subchannels, determined the type of modulation being used, and ran them through the appropriate demodulator algorithm. I don't know what happened to the data after that.
We didn't use custom chips. A cabinet full of Schottky MSI chips was enough for a three processor system. The system's speed was due to parallelism, not high clock rate.
By the way, one of our computer rooms was built inside a big metal box that was suspended from the roof on cables. When it mattered, all external connections except for power were unplugged. We were too cheap to pay for a shielded air-conditioning system, so tests lasted a maximum of 20 minutes.
Don't mess with The Phone Company. Piss them off and you'll be using two tin cans and a piece of string.