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August 29, 2007
EFF FOIA Requests Unveil Workings of FBI Surveillance System
Wired News documents the workings of DCSNet, the FBI's nationwide Eavesdropping Network:
Using information gleaned from documents the EFF obtained using FOIA requests, the report says DCSNet is "far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected."
How intricately woven?
The network allows an FBI agent in New York, for example, to remotely set up a wiretap on a cell phone based in Sacramento, California, and immediately learn the phone's location, then begin receiving conversations, text messages and voicemail pass codes in New York. With a few keystrokes, the agent can route the recordings to language specialists for translation.
The numbers dialed are automatically sent to FBI analysts trained to interpret phone-call patterns, and are transferred nightly, by external storage devices, to the bureau's Telephone Application Database, where they're subjected to a type of data mining called link analysis.
FBI endpoints on DCSNet have swelled over the years, from 20 "central monitoring plants" at the program's inception, to 57 in 2005, according to undated pages in the released documents. By 2002, those endpoints connected to more than 350 switches.
Today, most carriers maintain their own central hub, called a "mediation switch," that's networked to all the individual switches owned by that carrier, according to the FBI. The FBI's DCS software links to those mediation switches over the internet, likely using an encrypted VPN. Some carriers run the mediation switch themselves, while others pay companies like VeriSign to handle the whole wiretapping process for them.
(via the EFF's link to the article)
Also via the EFF: Comments from Steve Bellovin on what's so worrying about this particular point-and-click surveillance network:
My biggest concern, though, lies in the words of one of the FBI's own security evaluations: the biggest threat is from insders. The network is properly encrypted for protection against outside attackers. The defenses against insiders � yes, rogue FBI agents or employees � are far too weak.
To sum up: we have a system that accesses very sensitive data, with few technical protections against inside attacks, and generic defenses that don't seem to fit the threat model.
Posted by mhall at 3:00 PM | Add Comment
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