From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Tue Apr 30 2002 - 13:00:46 MDT
On Monday, April 29, 2002, at 07:10 pm, Chuck Kuecker wrote:
> It's not so much the tech - it's the logistics. Kind of like "1984"'s
> telescreens - how could they ever monitor ALL of them?
>
> I would believe they have to capability to monitor any given line at a
> moment's notice - perhaps hundreds of thousands at once - but this is a
> far cry form recording every word.
>
> Chuck Kuecker
Telecommunication companies are already required to provide connection
points for government monitoring. These laws were passed in the mid
'90s to enforce compatibility when the government needed to access any
account. Such links monitor main backbones and not specific accounts.
Part of the outcry over Carnivore was that it recorded everything, and
was later filtered for the specific information that was desired. It
was claimed that it would be too hard to turn things on and off, or to
filter the traffic to only what they required. Thus, the government
records everything, but promises it doesn't look at anything without
proper authority.
It actually is easier for the government to record everything rather
than selectively choose what to record. It is easier to have taps
everywhere on all the time, rather than turning them on and off.
As for the monitoring, it is easy to capture a major telecomm stream,
and then split it up into array processors for parallel processing.
Most online transactions are batch processes, like e-mail, so the system
wouldn't even have to be real-time. Most traffic is repeat traffic,
like webpages, with very little change of the details for each customer.
You only imagine that this might be difficult, based on the equipment
you see in the commercial sector. Military technology is decades ahead
of the commercial sector. Their budget is many times larger, and their
paranoia many times stronger. The military and governments have been
doing things for decades that are only now coming out and which people
question is even possible.
-- Harvey Newstrom, CISSP <www.HarveyNewstrom.com> Principal Security Consultant <www.Newstaff.com>
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