April 10, 2006 | Spy Machine Capabilities?

A blogger named bewert over at Daily Kos follows up on allegations made by ex-AT&T employee Mark Klein that AT&T installed equipment at an AT&T Internet switching facility that feeds the NSA a copy of every Internet packet that flowing from or to AT&T customers or across AT&T's expansive Internet backbone network. I covered Klein's public statement for Wired News on Friday and his full statement can also be found here.

bewert looked into the machine alleging Narus STA 6400, did a little math and parsing of some public statements to find that the machine was capable of monitoring 39,000 DSL lines at any one time.

Prior to 9/11 Narus worked on building carrier-grade tools to analyze IP network traffic for billing purposes, to prevent what they term "revenue leakage". Post-9/11 they have continued down that path while adding more semantic monitoring abilities for surveillance purposes. They even brought in former Deputy Director of the NSA William P. Crowell as an addition to their Board of Directors. [...]

Remember that semantics is not just the data, but rather the meaning of the data. It looks at the data in a more comprehensive way than looking for keywords. Each NarusInsight machine does this at 2500 million bits per second, in real-time.[...]

These capabilities include playback of streaming media (i.e. VoIP), rendering of web pages, examination of e-mail and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols. Narus partner products offer the ability to quickly analyze information collected by the Directed Analysis or Lawful Intercept modules. When Narus partners' powerful analytic tools are combined with the surgical targeting and real-time collection capabilities of Directed Analysis and Lawful Intercept modules, analysts or law enforcement agents are provided capabilities that have been unavailable thus far.[...]

Posted by Ryan Singel at April 10, 2006 10:17 AM

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