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Under the Hood of AT&T's Monitoring System
pkbarbiedoll writes "The recent discovery of AT&T's monitoring program has raised more than a few eyebrows. While the class action suit filed by EFF is pending (as well as a seperate suit filed against the NSA filed by the ACLU), interested parties are taking the time to learn more about the scope of this massive invasion of privacy. Bewert examines the Narus architecture used by AT&T in their previously shadowed (and ongoing) collaboration with the NSA."
Yes spying and everything is wrong. But with the NSA having more power than ever and needing to acquire/sift through more and more information all the time, wouldn't it be a very cool place to work.
http://www.nsa.gov/careers/ has links to all the areas. The only thing I found extraordinarily interesting is that computer programming type skills (ie Software Engineering) is more under the Computer Engineering/Electrical engineering career track than the computer science one.
The only question is that if you should decide to leave the NSA or are fired, does termination extend to more than your employment? Although seriously it does seem like a very geek friendly place to work.
Tor (http://tor.eff.org/) is a good way to prevent the government (or anyone else) from watching what sites you go to.
It can be a little slow at times, but you do not need to use it all the time (unless you are very paranoid).
Good luck with that. Not to be a party pooper as this is /. and everybody here loves a good conspiracy theory and hates 'the man', but there are only a few huge global data telecom carriers in the world. AT&T happens to be among the big ones. So regardless of who gets your money, some of that money will get to AT&T regardless through backend peer agreements, leasing of lines and/or space from AT&T CO's, etc. It is naive to think that you can take all of your companies money away from AT&T. As you stated, you use a downstream provider of theirs, so AT&T wasn't getting all the money to begin with, and your provider probably (hopefully) has agreements with other upstream providers in addition to AT&T. All ISP's do this. It is incredibly stupid from an ISP's standpoint to only have a single upstream provider, so again, good luck with finding a provider in the US that does not peer with AT&T either directly or as a secondary.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70621-0.htm l (Wired). An interview of a guy that works (ed?) for ATT that the EFF has subpoenaed as a witness. Talks about the physical connection made and how/when they did it.
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That's circular logic, falling on the negative side. You're assuming that they didn't start any of the "plenty" wars that already exist (and feed into each other, creating new ones). They are rich because they know how to start wars. They are in the business of war - you don't think they have any vested interest in constant warfare? I've got news for you: every company wants a stable (and rising) bottom line. And if the executives in charge can't deliver that, the board will usually remove them and fine someone who can.
Congressmen often say that they get a lot of dire predictions and studies and sales pitches right around budget time from all the bureaucrats in the Pentagon, and from the defense companies and their lobbyists. They use fear to encourage our congress critters to pony up the dough for a budget that was bigger than last year, and the year before that. They have a nexus generals who will play into this fear campaign and give apocalyptic prognostications on demand (military men aren't idealists).
Face facts: our leaders and our business community and our military command structure all get together and create wars on whatever pretext they can muster. They consider it good for the economy and good for America. I consider it evil.
It seems pretty clear that Iran is next on the list.
Where the hell do you get these ideas?
I read. I read books that aren't just patriotic hornblowing. I also have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single fucking thing any politician says when a mic's on. It's a very rare condition, apparently. Only known cure is execution.
Electric Monkey Pants
The date you mention is when the product was made.
It wasn't turned against the US citizenry until much later, post 9-11. The information on when that occurred is in the previous articles.
The embrace and the tolerance are two indicators, not one.
You would improve the legibility of the sentence by delimiting the participle clauses with commas, particularly with regard to the repetition of the word "and".
Embracing the degradation of standards, and tolerating ignorance and stupidity, are two of the best... etc.
- Sig files: contemptibly familiar the second time around.
Why am I not surprised? Plus his company is invested in by Walden Israel, a VC division of Walden International. Walden Israel is headed by a guy who spent five years with a company developing optics for the ISRAELI MILITARY.
Why am I not surprised?
First, an Israeli company in charge of Federal wiretapping gets caught selling wiretapping info to drug dealers in LA and the FBI gets upset over their access to Federal wiretaps.
Now this - an NSA guy and an Israeli running the company sucking data into the NSA - and the Mossad?
As I've said before, Israel has figured out that the best way to spy on people is to be the country making all the telecommo hardware and software all the other countries use to spy on people. Brilliant strategy - and it's working.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
When reading the article linked to please double check the writers math. While the numbers given for the capture rate are large the example seems to state that 10,000 million DSL links at a speed of 256K would be captured @ layer 4 on the 10Gbps links. My math suggests that there are aprox. 3900 DSL links @ 256Kbps each in 1Gbps,a nd therefore approx 39K @ 10Gbps. What is really missing here for me is details about the 'flow', ala Cisco NetFlow, rate per second which would effect the layer 4 processing rate. As we 'converse', i.e. traverse the tier1 transits, we send many frames in a single flow which could occur over several seconds. In a NetFlow like consideration all of such frames would comprise a single flow accounting and thus the 'data rate' to the probe, narus or otherwise, would be considerably smaller. Those tier1 transits probably do have 1000's, even 10's of 1000's of concurrent flows per second. that number is still not overwhelming as I myself have coded and operated NetFlow processing systems that process normalized records into an RDBMS at the rate of 1G records per day which is a per-second rate of under 12000 flows per second on 6x 450mhz SUN system. And I don't find Sparc to be the most powerful or processing environments! Surely the full 10Gbps per second full capture and storage of such feeds IS impressive and any such solution would have to have massive storage capacity on many storage channels opperating concurrently in order to just capture the data for later analysis. But those solutions can be purchased, just think EMC and a bunch of fiber channels. You could even experiment with this on your own DSL, or cable, by loading up ethereal and storing everything to your ata just to see that it is feasible. From there you could bypass all the cannd solution by going straight to libpcap and your homegrown code, Perl being my preference, and readily include your own indexing/tagging scheme to the data being grabbed by libpcap. So, certainly there is great issue here, however i is not one about the amount of hardware needed. I suggest a 'wire speed' collector writing to a large high speed storage with backend systems having read access to that storage for subsequent processing is rather straight forward for the 'average' homebrew.
Was this the bar in Hell's Kitchen in Deus Ex? =OP
I did a little poking around, and Bloomberg is the only mainstream news service/news website with any stories about the EFF lawsuit or the Mark Klein statement. How come the general media hasn't picked up this story? Isn't it newsworthy that Ma Bell is being sued for colluding with an illegal government domestic spying dragnet?
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
There is also some additional information on the FindLaw site for those that are curious.