NSA/FBI monitoring

coderman coderman at gmail.com
Wed Jun 3 10:07:40 PDT 2015


On 6/2/15, M373 <M373 at riseup.net> wrote:
> The NSA provides data to the FBI and DEA, among others...
> ... The FBI does do its own surveillance
> and can easily tap telecoms with programs such as DCSNet and Red Hook,
> but they don't have the resources (as far I know) to do the blanket
> surveillance that NSA (and GCHQ, CSE, etc) does.

FBI is NSA's front man for domestic programs. see DITU and how PRISM,
while an NSA program, is coordinated through FBI.

FBI does provide blanket surveillance, although they must launder
information through parallel construction before the surveillance
becomes legally actionable.



> NSA collects nearly all
> internet traffic in the USA with its intercept rooms at the network
> control centers that big telecoms have on the internet backbone. They
> gather almost everything, including content, not just metadata. The
> announced capacity of the Bluffton, Utah data center is several orders
> of magnitude more than is needed to store metadata alone.

to be clear, they inspect nearly everything in-line with "Deep Packet
Inspection" and "semantic analysis" and similar techniques, e.g. Narus
Insight, at the edges rather than centrally. there is an order of
magnitude less capacity for NSANet uplink than what is monitored
through taps. they could not pull a mirror of all traffic if they
wanted to!

then, the selected stuff is collected and stored forever*. the Utah
massive data repository is not full take buffer, but rather
persistence for selected or collected information.

(full take on backbones a technical challenge, and not everywhere.)



> ... With the FBI, as far as I know, you have to be targeted
> (except for the IMSI catcher type stuff, which are indiscriminate but
> not an nationwide/international dragnet). The AP story about the FBI
> surveillance planes is quite interesting, although fits with recent info
> and long term trends.

as discussed elsewhere, you can get "selected" for various activities,
which is auto-targeting, in a sense...

best regards,



* for some definition of "forever".



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