Slashdot Mirror
Former FBI Agent: All Digital Communications Stored By US Gov't
New submitter davesays writes "CNN anchors Erin Burnett and Carol Costello have interviewed Former FBI Counterterrorisim specialist Tim Clemente. In the interviews he asserts that all digital communications are recorded and stored. Clemente: 'No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.' 'All of that stuff' — meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on U.S. soil, with or without a search warrant — 'is being captured as we speak.' 'No digital communication is secure,' by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications — meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like — are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is."
Either this is true and so secret even most of law enforcement doesn't have access or it simply isn't true. Having run a large enough telecom operation to deal with CALEA I can say for sure that law enforcement very much needed our help to do anything with our customers' communications. Not only did they need to come to us with proper warrants in the first place, but they barely had enough technology sense to be able to do anything with it. Anything more complicated than taps and CDRs never even came up.
Clemente: 'No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.' 'All of that stuff' â" meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on U.S. soil, with or without a search warrant â" 'is being captured as we speak.' 'No digital communication is secure,' by which he means not that any communication is susceptible to government interception as it happens (although that is true), but far beyond that: all digital communications â" meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like â" are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact. To describe that is to define what a ubiquitous, limitless Surveillance State is."
Dear US official;
All of my communications are sent via encrypted proxy, and set to stream constantly. The proxy dumps into Tor and a half-dozen other networks. I originally did this for shits and giggles, to see how hard it would be. I will admit the latency is a bit higher than doing it locally, but it is very usable in spite of this. I also signed up for the Tor Cloud project and run an EC2 micro-instance to help others do the same.
Originally, I just did this as an experiment, but after reading things like what you're saying and realizing that we've become a surveillance state on par with Iran, China, and North Korea (where did they get their filtering and monitoring hardware from again? Oh right: We gave it to them), I decided to keep it.
I don't do anything special with my super duper encrypted "all the things" setup. I wish I could say I was some elite ninja hacker or something, but all I really do is browse internet forum sites and read the BBC news, and you know, download a few TV shows here and there. I'm one of those people that doesn't have anything to hide per-se, but when I live under the tyranny of a government that has turned their citizens into the enemy -- the attitude that we're all criminals or potential criminals, and must be monitored pre-emptively, I feel like it's my duty to frustrate the hell out of people like you.
So I have been helping friends, family, and strangers, set their computers up the same way. Yeah, I know, some of them will probably use their newfound freedom and anonymity for evil, but frankly, even a terrorist attack a week and all the rantings in the world from you (that may even be justified) about how criminals can use this technology for their own nefarious purposes, doesn't deter me.
You crossed a line; Morally, ethically, constitutionally. By criminalizing the average citizen, you have become a bigger danger than all the terrorists, all the "real" criminals. You are corrupt, dangerous, and seek to undermine our democratic way of life. You hide in the shadows and see conspiracies everywhere, and are convinced of your own righteous cause. You are as dangerous as a religious fundamentalist, because just like their dogmas, yours demands absolute purity. There will always be more justifications to invade the privacy of others.
So I will continue to teach anyone who wants to, how to fight back against your tyranny. You're a threat to the way of life of not just myself, but my peers. You're a danger to all Americans -- you view us as the enemy. Your own people.
You've lost your way.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
It's also wrong. I worked for a regional non-Bell telco. We didn't capture anything that wasn't ordered by a court order, and even then, only the bare minumum to meet the court order.
Maybe his statement should have instead been "the Bells, Verizon, and TWC capture all and forward it to the government." I've heard rumors of that related to AT&T, but never any confirmation. But to say "all" is simply false. Maybe they keep all they get, but I know for a fact they don't get "all".
Learn to love Alaska
More than storage capacity, they need software and/or manpower to analyze everything. More likely his superiors just lied to his face about this or he was paid to say such things to make people think twice about doing any rebellious shit.
This combination doesn`t exist: ETIs that know about humanity and want to see us dead. Otherwise we wouldn't exist.
We didn't capture anything that wasn't ordered by a court order, and even then, only the bare minumum to meet the court order.
You didn't need to capture anything. According to him, the government was doing it for you. (Or rather, for them.)
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
Several years ago a friend of mine and I tried to work out what would be required to store all of the voice communications in the U.S., though I've since lost the spreadsheet I did the calculations on. We initially started off with Xbox Live! game chat, which we quickly determined could easily be archived by Microsoft with a (for them) fairly small bank of servers. We then went on to cell phones. It was hard to estimate, but using what we could find online it didn't seem too ridiculous that even with the most liberal estimates of voice data consumption, an entity with access to the streams could likely store all mobile voice communications. VoIP estimates were a lot harder as we couldn't find any real data on total usage, but we did learn that most copper wire has been eliminated and nearly all phone communications now are digital. Since this eliminates the (more expensive) need to covert audio to data, it is not impossible to do. Given the comparably lower price in storage since we went through that, I imagine that the cost of obtaining and storing all voice communications in the U.S., and all communications routed through the U.S., would be less than a rounding error in the DOD's budget.
Ahhh if only the government would be so kind as to freely back up all the classic usenet celebrity fakes of Gillian Anderson and provide them free of charge on the open internet as a public service. This world would be on the right path indeed.
They may sift it for key-words, and record who, where, and when, but not necessarily the entire conversation or transaction.
Table-ized A.I.
Well we already know they have the means to do keyword searches on a great deal of data. Carnivore has been debated openly before congress so I would definitely have to agree thats the minimum capability to expect.
He's not right. I've worked at a non-Bell telco, and they don't capture anything not ordered by a specific warrant, and only then, for the warrant, and no more than necessary to comply with the order.
I've heard rumors that AT&T captures all, but never anything that confirms that. Perhaps he meant that the major carriers provide streaming replicas of all traffic to the government, who then archives some (or all) of it. But I know for a fact that "all" is just plain wrong.
Learn to love Alaska
So the guy is lying?
Probably. He is trying to make a name for himself as a consultant. This claim will give him some publicity. If his claim was true, hundreds of people would know about it, and all of them would know they were breaking the law. Some of these people would be in government, but many of them would be in telecom companies, that would have no reason to cooperate, and plenty of reason not to (losing customers, end of career, prison time, etc.). Of course, no amount of logic or absence of evidence this will stop the conspiracy theories (see below). Of course, if it actually was true, the FBI would probably hire shills to go on Slashdot and spread disinformation, and try to convince everyone that there was no vast conspiracy, so why should you trust me?
unless of course the freedoms that you want are verboten by that power..
Not to assert one way or the other whether he's telling the truth, but...
It's much more sensible to record everything and keep it for a short while and then begin a process of attrition. If everything is accessible for 1 hour, that's pretty powerful because you can freeze data after an event happens and look for what you need. After one hour, maybe only certain things and certain people are tracked for up to a day... then a week... a month... a year...
Asking people to think is like asking them to buy you a new car
This guy seems to be implying that the government has some kind of man-in-middle technology that intercepts and records *all* traffic, which simply isn't true.
The majority of the internet goes over telecom links. The few parts of it that don't, almost always have at least one hop that transits one of the major carriers networks. They don't have to monitor "all" traffic. They just have to monitor one of the hops in the chain.
All IP traffic can be reduced to a stream. TCP/IP has some extra error-correction options to keep it all in order, but a stream is a stream nonetheless. And when you start looking at very large data sets, you're going to quickly discover that the majority of it is just a copy of another set of data.
People here seem to think that monitoring all network traffic is unrealistic because of the storage considerations, but they don't have to store every byte; Just the unique bytes. If you download the CNN homepage, the storage application doesn't need to hold onto that entire transaction; It can just record the headers and timestamp, and then reference the same stream that a few hundred thousand other people also downloaded.
Most of the internet's traffic isn't encrypted, and so the amount of entropy on it is low, despite the very high bandwidth. This statistical fact paired with shannon's laws, which in turn are based on the laws of thermodynamics, provide the basis of a practical surveillance solution.
When you add in intelligent filtering, the amount of data to be stored drops even more. You probably don't need to worry about terrorists communicating via Netflix for example; And that makes up a significant chunk of internet traffic (look it up; it's a surprise).
The other thing about intelligence assets is that they all have a 'use by' date. The more time goes by, the less valuable the data becomes. Eventually, you reach a point of diminishing returns; That is the point at which you can safely delete the data. It doesn't matter whether it contained terrorist communications or the next 9/11 or not... if you haven't found it by the cutoff time, it's worthless.
Combine these attributes and what this man is saying is, in fact, achievable. Now... processing that data and turning into useful, timely, and accurate intelligence... that, people, is a whole 'nother can of worms. And realistically, where the bulk of the resources is going to be. Storage is a non-starter. Analysis is the bitch of it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
So the guy is lying? Perhaps. Or just exaggerating. But I doubt there isn't more than one data center for this very purpose. The question is what kind of hardware would be necessary to compress all the data live.
If he wasn't lying, he would be arrested for violation of his LIFE LONG NDA you sign when you take a job with the The FBI.
So if he is picked up for tax evasion or some similar nonsense charge, then I'll start to believe him, but until then, I suspect he has a book he is peddling now or in the near future.
People should remember just how terrible Americans are at keeping a secret. Someone would have leaked this long ago, just as the secret room at the AT&T switch center was leaked within a couple months.
It wouldn't come from a lowly guy hyping a book.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
While the FBI might not be the sharpest tool in the shed they have infinite resources thanks to the national security black budget. Granted if you have a private network that doesn't peer with any of the big backbones like AT&T then your a probably safe. Once your voice/data hops onto a major backbone like AT&T your data has been sold to the US Government. There are even allegation that this system is contributing names to the no-fly list through heuristic language analysis of voice traffic. To see if you networks are safe, use the word "bomb" as often as you can and if you aren't added to the no-fly list, your networks are probably safe :)
I think the real solution to the problem is to start generating massive amounts of meaningless data until the spooks run out of storage.
Security and Privacy are an illusion. Welcome to 1984 about three decades late.
They do have good off line secret installations. Where security is really important. I went to Ft Huachuca for computer security training and they did a fairly decent job for low level IT staff there. The instructors and some of the other people at that base genuinely knew what they were doing.
DoD care a lot less about every day logistics systems for barracks assignments then they do about keeping under wraps their mission planning or god knows what else, I couldn't get anything out of anyone that mattered.
I'm no longer serving. But you can rest assured there are some in the service that are good at what they do.
You're unaware that the NSA has a room in every major telco hub then? And that the techs aren't allowed to even look crossways at it or what they're hooked into, even for network diagnostic purposes? Huh.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
Think of the sheer amount of storage, electricity, infrastructure, personal, computing resources and so on that you would need in order to perform this feat. The numbers would be boggling and would account for a significant portion of the worldwide sales of all hard drives, tape back ups etc, etc.
Well, the internet was clocking about 21 exabytes per month in 2010. However, the overwhelming majority of that traffic is redundant; if you remove the redundancy in the data set and then compress it, you're probably looking at less than an exabyte of data over the public internet. You can reduce that further with whitelists; Traffic from Netflix, for example, is probably not going to contain super secret terrorist communications.
So let's say you can cut that down to only record the most relevant 5%. That's about 1 exabyte. How much would that cost? Well, in 2008, they guesstimated this to be about $400 million. A single stealth bomber costs about $2.1 billion; So the yearly storage costs of "the internet" is about 2 stealth bombers. -_-
So at least as far as the data storage is concerned, I think it's well within the government's budget. Now, making that data usable and analysis of it... hooo boy... that's gonna be the bitch of it. But storage? Solved.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
"'ve heard rumors that AT&T captures all, but never anything that confirms that. "
It most certainly is confirmed. In a court case some years ago, a technician outed that the government had installed a splitter in a special room in one of their exchanges, which fed ALL of their digital data straight to the government. The telcos involved admitted that it was only one of many such. Mass collection, and no warrants involved, anywhere.
In fact, that was the whole reason Congress voted to give telcos immunity, remember? How short our memories can be.
Having said that: where is immunity for the Government? It doesn't have any. And this is about as blatantly un-Constitutional as you can get.
I have been wondering for several years where the public uproar over this is. It's a crime against The People... as defined by our own laws.
Probably. He is trying to make a name for himself as a consultant.
He worked in the FBI's counter-terrorism division. I don't think he needs to "make a name" for himself. His resume already says enough.
If his claim was true, hundreds of people would know about it, and all of them would know they were breaking the law.
And as we know, government officials never break the law. Glad we cleared that one up.
but many of them would be in telecom companies, that would have no reason to cooperate,
They have guns. Lots of guns. Feeling lucky, punk?
). Of course, no amount of logic or absence of evidence this will stop the conspiracy theories (see below).
"Conspiracy theories by a former official in a credible position to know these things." FTFY.
Of course, if it actually was true, the FBI would probably hire shills to go on Slashdot and spread disinformation, and try to convince everyone that there was no vast conspiracy, so why should you trust me?
Why would the FBI give two shits about a geek news site? And why would they need to convince you, me, or anyone else, there wasn't a "vast conspiracy"? You're making a straw man here. A big one.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Could I ask them to restore that email I accidentally deleted last week?
There was a nice joke about the "inconspicuous" nature of Stasi surveillance:
Q: How can you tell when the Stasi has bugged your apartment?
A: You find an unexplained large cabinet in the apartment, and on the street a trailer with a diesel generator has parked...
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Seriously, you mean a data center like this can't handle the traffic?
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/
and the 5 million people (as of 2011) with security clearances aren't enough?
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/07/security-clearances-increasing/
and the NSA recruiting at Defcon and math colleges all around the country isn't happening?
http://www.federalnewsradio.com/411/2890348/NSA-hiring-reforms-serve-as-model-for-government
These guys have cash and are all of their activities are shielded under FISA and the National Security Act and State Secrets Privilege.
http://www.aclu.org/national-security/fix-fisa-end-warrantless-wiretapping
It's happening, it is a reality, and it is more than possible. Even with an inside whistle blower, the courts will not limit the power of the government to spy on us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
The only thing we really have going for us is the Catch-22 on the use of the data. If it is every used in a trial, chain of custody and 4th amendment issues likethe exclusionary rule will suppress the evidence since it was obtained without a warrant. The only thing that stands in the way of the NSA and fully implementing 1984 is the 4th amendment.
A switch room that contains a deep packet scanner is not the same thing as sending ALL internet traffic to a storage system. More likely it's just a tap.
The thing that makes me doubt this is the cost. To funnel a copy of the internet to the Feds would require building a shadow internet plus storage for the whole thing.
In 2007 we were using "A single NarusInsight machine can monitor traffic equal to the maximum capacity (10 Gbit/s) of around 39,000 256k DSL lines or 195,000 56k telephone modems. But, in practical terms, since individual internet connections are not continually filled to capacity, the 10 Gbit/s capacity of one NarusInsight installation enables it to monitor the combined traffic of several million broadband users.". The Wikipedia page doesn't seem to have any real updates since 2007. Of course traffic has increased since then, but I doubt they bother to store streaming video of Justin Bieber from YouTube - which is reputedly 98% of all bandwidth consumption apart from pron.
What was the size of the LHC storage by the way? Oh, that's right, in 2010 it was "About 50PB of tape storage, handled by a set of robotic storage hardware. Still, they've been finding that disk storage is working well, and have scaled that up to 20PB worth of storage." http://arstechnica.com/science/2010/08/lhc-computing-grid-pushes-petabytes-of-data-beats-expectations/
However the good news is that in 2011 "Our annual data consumption was estimated at 9.57 zettabytes" on the internet. A difference of 21-15=6 orders of magnitude. http://www.engadget.com/2011/04/07/our-annual-data-consumption-estimated-at-9-57-zettabytes-or-9-57/ So unless NarusInsight can find and throw away a million times more Bieber than your snarky comments on Sub Reddit, "Revolutionary rodents against the government" they don't have that on disk yet, But they could probably record all telephone conversation.
I seem to recall that rumor used to have it that only all calls in and out of the USA were monitored, it would not be at all surprising to find that the capability to monitor all internal calls were available. The only reason it might not be happening is that the transcontinental calls route through a finite set of fiber or satellite links, whereas call data on the internet in the USA could route through a very much higher set of nodes that would need to be monitored to capture the data.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
There's not a lot of storage necessary. Not what you're thinking. Text messages and chats are very small in size. Phone conversations are very small using the right codecs. I also heard once about 8 years ago that the US government was buying up symmetrix like they were going out of style.
Honestly, I believe it. It's entirely possible.
They're using their grammar skills there.
"A switch room that contains a deep packet scanner is not the same thing as sending ALL internet traffic to a storage system. More likely it's just a tap."
No, the public record is clear. It's not a "switch room", it's a splitter. And yes, the technical and expense implications of that have been debated and re-debated, re-hashed and triple-warmed-over.
They are splitters. And they send ALL the digital data on fiber that enter those exchanges directly to government. No packet inspection (at those locations, anyway), and no "taps". Just a "Y" in the fibers.
(Yes, I realize that technically it's quite a bit more complicated than that, because it involves amplifiers and lots of other things. This, too, was brought up in the court case. But that's what it is. It's in the public court records. Again: that's why the telcos were given immunity. Where were you when this was all going on?)
If memory serves, the STASI eventually had about 1/3 of the population involved in informing on someone or something and never came close to be able to analyze all the data they got.
Sovereign immunity... and it has existed for far longer than this nation has.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
On the internet, 640 terabytes of data is transferred every minute. That means in a year, you have 330 exabytes of data. Not only that, you need the infrastructure to transfer it. You can deduplicate and stuff, but even deduplicating that much data is not exactly an afternoon hack.
Think of that: you're adding 640 terabytes to your database every minute.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The average cell phone usage is 459 minutes/month * 300 M cell phones / 2 * 60 sec * 3 KB/sec = 13,000 PB/month (uncompressed).
Why the "/ 2"/ Assuming that every phone call made from a cell phone is also to a cell phone? And not doing compression, but doing dedup?
I don't know how others use theirs, but most of my phone calls aren't social, but to businesses and their land lines.
Anyhow, CTIA lists 2.30 Teraminutes yearly per December 2012. Presumably that's also counting cell-to-cell twice, which I'm sure the three letter agencies would record twice too (if nothing else to record what was said when there's a drop-out in the connection on either end). That's 138 Teraseconds, which at 3 kB/s would be 414 PB per year, before compression.
That's a far cry from your 13,000 PB per month (or 156 EB per year), and spread out over multiple providers absolutely doable from a capacity viewpoint. Especially since it doesn't have to be online for a year, but can go on tape. If ten datacenters recorded this, with a fluctuation of 40% in data density between them, and flushed everything to tape within a week, each would need less than 2 PB of online storage.
But do I believe they do so? No. If they did, they wouldn't have a way to mine the data. It would possibly be useful as evidence after the fact, but not for monitoring purposes. It's way too much data.
Here is Klein's statement.
https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/att/SER_klein_decl.pdf
The splitter sent the internet traffic to a secure room.
And another interview with Klein:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interviews/klein.html
It's pretty obvious that room contained a Narus DPI. End of story.
> I seem to recall that rumor used to have it that only all calls in and out of the USA were monitored,
That looks like the NSA's legal requirements to monitor only foreign communications. They were prohibited from monitoring domestic communications, that was the responsibility of the FBI. Unfortunately, "Homeland Security" was created in the wake of 9/11 specifically to merge and organize data among the various intelligence services, and part of the result is that you can't effectively prosecute one agency for overstepping its bounds by going to the other agencies. They can all rely on Homeland Security to cover for them with "Patriot Act" court free search orders, or groundless "national security" orders that prevent even disclosing that your clients have been monitored.
Homeland Security is an extremely dangerous concentration of monitoring and investigation power. I sincerely hope that the antipathy of the more specialized intelligence agencies continues to hinder their growth.
By this logic we should also believe Bob Lazar about alien technologies. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and the word of one insider means squat.
His "extraordinary" claim is that the government is doing what Google has already done: Indexing the entire internet, with the only difference being one of scale. I think if a private company started by a few college kids can do that, a government with nearly a trillion dollars in operating budget can come up with something.
So your argument is that they will cooperate or be shot? This isn't even a sane way for a conspiracy to operate.
Correct. But then, it's not a conspiracy. He's suggesting a corporation wouldn't cooperate with law enforcement requests. That's patently absurd; Corporations have little to gain and loads to lose if they decide to go against the government. Multi-billion dollar corporations aren't known for behaving like belligerant teenagers.
The point is that the scale of the conspiracy necessary to pull this off is vast enough to make this extremely unlikely.
Except it isn't a conspiracy; we're talking about a national 'darknet' that taps key points in the internet and then mirrors that data to a processing facility before being stored in a relational database. It's not a conspiracy, numerous government officials have already gone on the record as saying this technology exists, today, now. It's not classified. It's not a secret. They've come right out and said this capability exists.
LOL
A former agent for the counter-terrorism branch of our largest federal law enforcement agency talking about the technology used in counter-terrorism is about as credible as it gets, dude. LOL all you want, but your own cred is the only thing the rest of us are laughing at: You're an internet pundit.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
If he wasn't lying, he would be arrested for violation of his LIFE LONG NDA you sign when you take a job with the The FBI.
That's such a load of bullshit I'm surprised I'm the first to call you out on it. The overwhelming majority of the FBI's records are public; they're called court cases. And yes, the agents can discuss them. The agents can even discuss the methods that they use. The only thing agents can't discuss is material related to an active or ongoing investigation, or material that has been classified. There no evidence that either condition has been met here.
People should remember just how terrible Americans are at keeping a secret.
Yup. Everybody knows how to build nuclear weapons, stealth bombers, ICBMs, because we're terrible at keeping secrets. So, tell me, what's the maximum listing angle that any of our nuclear submarines can operate at before they automatically shut down? You don't know? Okay, how about this one: When is the next high-energy test of the HARRP? Don't know that one either? Umm, how about a real easy one: Who's the pilot of Air Force One? Ah, didn't think so.
Someone would have leaked this long ago, just as the secret room at the AT&T switch center was leaked within a couple months.
Yeah, it's a super duper big secret that the government can tap phones and digital lines. Dude, you make this leak sound like it was some kind of blow to our nation's intelligence operations, rather than having all the relevance of knowing the President ordered his latte with skim milk this morning. It wasn't a secret; It just wasn't advertised. There's a big difference. You won't find our nuclear missile silos in North Dakota on google map with the words "Secret Nuclear Missile Silos Here" underneath; But that doesn't mean they aren't there, nor does it mean that there's extra-special effort being taken to keep them secret. They just aren't advertised -- everyone knows they're there.
It wouldn't come from a lowly guy hyping a book.
Yes, a "lowly" agent of our largest law enforcement agency, discussing something that he did professionally for many years, and the tools he used to do that job should be trusted less than random internet pundit "leaking" the same information.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
DPI = deep packet inspection. A TCP/IP packet contains header(s) and body. The header tells you the address and some info re the protocol. The body is the content. Most internet infrastructure only cares about the header. Something that is capable of DPI will recover the content of some types of packets. Which ones depends on the capability of the DPI unit you use.
So if you want to search for email sent to joe@there.com you need to use DPI because the email header is in the body.
Use of a splitter is step one for DPI.
This article talks about the AT&T / Mark Klein incident:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection#United_States
Narus
For more than 26 years, Dell has empowered countries, communities, customers, and people everywhere with the right technologies to realize their dreams.
Blue Coat
Dell is a strategic reseller & global systems integrator for Blue Coat’s products. Blue Coat’s products are available through the Dell Software & Peripherals catalog for a variety of Secure Web Gateway, WAN Optimization & Visibility solutions.
Dell's Sunnyvale offices are at 909 Hermosa Ct Sunnyvale, CA... not on the same street, but physically adjacent to Blue Coat's campus. Its building is about 40 feet from Blue Coat's... for Dell employees, it's a shorter walk to Blue Coat than it is to some of their own cars in the parking lot.
Spelled out: Blue Coat and Dell work together to sell governments equipment to monitor their citizens' communications. And so do Narus and Dell.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/worlds-1st-exabyte-storage-system/1266
All US telephone conversations per day approx: 1.5 Petabytes
Fits easily.
Room for 2 years worth, or are you going to tell me US govt 3-letter agencies don't spend much on data centers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.