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."
You bastards. You've slashdotted echelon.
Posting as annoyomous coward due to evil echelon listening post in the hills behind me. Will get my revenge.
of cananda. :)
That damn intelligence war must be really working.
Timang tinggi tinggi
parang sudah asah
alang alang mandi
biar sampai basah
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
Just use some Vi@gra and Septic T@nks in your email!
Spy in the sky satellites listen in to what we say and look at what we do. Then solid state disk keeps the real time analysis of these calls and images operating at full speed. The world's fastest storage system is used in the world's most sophisticated spying operation.
Here's to hoping it never becomes sentient.
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 know that this has been talked about before on Slashdot but I think the most disturbing thing about Echelon isn't the hardware (although I'd bet there is a great deal more to it than the current article talks about) but the fact that it is used to spy on whoever it happens to pickup. A certain keyword in a communication is all that it takes to get Echelon's attention and then you are in it's grasp.
If you happen to be a U.S. citizen or resident, it is unlawful for the U.S. government to monitor your communications without a warrant. This is no problem for Echelon, the Canadians or the Brits will do it for the U.S. It is one giant loophole for the governments involved to spy on their own people as well as anyone else.
I don't really have that much to hide but I do value my rights and my privacy so that bothers me. I know that the powers-that-be justify this as being part of the defense of the free world, that this is a necessary component on the war on terrorisiom and that such draconian measures are justified to keep us safe. But, if I have to give up my rights, my privlidges as a resident of a free country, I can't accept that explaination. Simply because the tool has become a tool of a different kind of terror. It is a took used by a represive government, used against it's own people.
I fear a repressive regime in my own country far more than I fear Osama Bin Laden and his henchmen.
So many of the changes made since 9/11 have played into the hands of terrorists. The changes have made the way we live, the way we travel, and the way we do business much more restrictive and expensive. Airport security is probably the most glaring example of this. We aren't anonymous travelers just getting from place to place anymore. We are electronically monitored, our travels documented. Those TSA agents and airport police aren't free - every traveler and every citizen pays for them.
Echelon is worse than that in some ways. We don't know if or when our conversations and other communications are monitored. It is hidden from our view, shielded behind a digital curtain of secrecy. If it is used against us, we will probably never know.
Some people probably say: "What's the big deal if it is also used to catch drug dealers anyway? They are just criminals." I can understand that position but have to say that it is a pretty narrow view. The truth is that you can't make two wrongs make a right. A regime that turns it's military against it's own people isn't very far from being the enemy. This is the kind of thing that the Gestapo did in Germany. It is just wrong.
I'm glad to think that I live in a free country. I'm just not sure that we are as free as we think we are. I'm afraid that we already have our own version of "secret police."
The ACLU has a fairly comprehensive, albeit slightly out of date, site dedicated to ECHELON.
Since it's slashdotted, I have a question: could someone please tell me what is that "echelon" thing we are talking about? It seems interesting with those trillion floating point operations and all that but I don't have much time to search for more info right now because I am very busy building a nuclear bomb for Robert Malda, pseudonym CmdrTaco, Commander in Chief of the Slashdot terrorist organisation, and if I don't give it to him before the narcotic transport arrives and he won't be able to assassinate the president on time, then my arse is going to expericence some serious jihad with his weapons of mass destruction, because how else will he be able to overthrow the federal government and start the violent uprising to destroy democracy and bring Islamic fundamentalism to the US? So, could anyone tell me what's that? Thanks.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
What I'd like to see is the list of numbers blocked from processing. White House? Kremlin? Saudi royal family? Raytheon executives and mistresses? Don't tell me everyone's equal under this scheme.
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.
How is it we can get exact specs for Echelon, but not for Google?
Using FPGAs for an Echelon type system where maximizing GB/s is a primary goal? Unlikely.
I work on digital system designs clocked in the 150MHz region. No problem at all meeting the timing constraints on a typical 0.13um ASIC technology. We use FPGA's for testing and validation, however, and the latest and greatest FPGA's are maxing out with our designs at around 90MHz.
Now look at the clock speeds on the x86 you are using to browse this page. 3GHz maybe? How fast would this design run on FPGA (assuming it would fit)? Unlikely to reach even 1/10th the speed. Why not say to Intel/AMD/TI "You still use ASICs!?!"
In terms of speed, current FPGA technology cannot get anyway near the performance of a well optimized ASIC design (even with the same core process technology).
How about a new type of slashdot effect... we pick a few random bad words and slashdotters make sure to mention them several times in all phone conversations.
How about a new type of slashdot effect... we pick a few random bad words and slashdotters make sure to mention them several times in all phone conversations.
Thats a capitol idea, comrad. you are da bomb. Now, if you will excuse me while I nuke a burrito and trim a bush in my back yard. See for several days this bag dad bought has been getting on my last nerve. Gas up the lincon, we are going to kill some time.