industryterm:internet surveillance

  • The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
    https://theintercept.com/2018/06/25/att-internet-nsa-spy-hubs

    The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s “extreme willingness to help.” It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it “has access to information that transits the nation,” but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.

    It is an efficient point to conduct internet surveillance, Klein said, “because the peering links, by the nature of the connections, are liable to carry everybody’s traffic at one point or another during the day, or the week, or the year.”

    Christopher Augustine, a spokesperson for the NSA, said in a statement that the agency could “neither confirm nor deny its role in alleged classified intelligence activities.” Augustine declined to answer questions about the AT&T facilities, but said that the NSA “conducts its foreign signals intelligence mission under the legal authorities established by Congress and is bound by both policy and law to protect U.S. persons’ privacy and civil liberties.”

    Jim Greer, an AT&T spokesperson, said that AT&T was “required by law to provide information to government and law enforcement entities by complying with court orders, subpoenas, lawful discovery requests, and other legal requirements.” He added that the company provides “voluntary assistance to law enforcement when a person’s life is in danger and in other immediate, emergency situations. In all cases, we ensure that requests for assistance are valid and that we act in compliance with the law.”

    Dave Schaeffer, CEO of Cogent Communications, told The Intercept that he had no knowledge of the surveillance at the eight AT&T buildings, but said he believed “the core premise that the NSA or some other agency would like to look at traffic … at an AT&T facility.” He said he suspected that the surveillance is likely carried out on “a limited basis,” due to technical and cost constraints. If the NSA were trying to “ubiquitously monitor” data passing across AT&T’s networks, Schaeffer added, he would be “extremely concerned.”

    An estimated 99 percent of the world’s intercontinental internet traffic is transported through hundreds of giant fiber optic cables hidden beneath the world’s oceans. A large portion of the data and communications that pass across the cables is routed at one point through the U.S., partly because of the country’s location – situated between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia – and partly because of the pre-eminence of American internet companies, which provide services to people globally.

    The NSA calls this predicament “home field advantage” – a kind of geographic good fortune. “A target’s phone call, email, or chat will take the cheapest path, not the physically most direct path,” one agency document explains. “Your target’s communications could easily be flowing into and through the U.S.”

    Once the internet traffic arrives on U.S. soil, it is processed by American companies. And that is why, for the NSA, AT&T is so indispensable. The company claims it has one of the world’s most powerful networks, the largest of its kind in the U.S. AT&T routinely handles masses of emails, phone calls, and internet chats. As of March 2018, some 197 petabytes of data – the equivalent of more than 49 trillion pages of text, or 60 billion average-sized mp3 files – traveled across its networks every business day.

    The NSA documents, which come from the trove provided to The Intercept by the whistleblower Edward Snowden, describe AT&T as having been “aggressively involved” in aiding the agency’s surveillance programs. One example of this appears to have taken place at the eight facilities under a classified initiative called SAGUARO.

    In October 2011, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves the surveillance operations carried out under Section 702 of FISA, found that there were “technological limitations” with the agency’s internet eavesdropping equipment. It was “generally incapable of distinguishing” between some kinds of data, the court stated. As a consequence, Judge John D. Bates ruled, the NSA had been intercepting the communications of “non-target United States persons and persons in the United States,” violating Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. The ruling, which was declassified in August 2013, concluded that the agency had acquired some 13 million “internet transactions” during one six-month period, and had unlawfully gathered “tens of thousands of wholly domestic communications” each year.

    The root of the issue was that the NSA’s technology was not only targeting communications sent to and from specific surveillance targets. Instead, the agency was sweeping up people’s emails if they had merely mentioned particular information about surveillance targets.

    A top-secret NSA memo about the court’s ruling, which has not been disclosed before, explained that the agency was collecting people’s messages en masse if a single one were found to contain a “selector” – like an email address or phone number – that featured on a target list.

    Information provided by a second former AT&T employee adds to the evidence linking the Atlanta building to NSA surveillance. Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, alleged in 2006 that the company had allowed the NSA to install surveillance equipment in some of its network hubs. An AT&T facility in Atlanta was one of the spy sites, according to documents Klein presented in a court case over the alleged spying. The Atlanta facility was equipped with “splitter” equipment, which was used to make copies of internet traffic as AT&T’s networks processed it. The copied data would then be diverted to “SG3” equipment – a reference to “Study Group 3” – which was a code name AT&T used for activities related to NSA surveillance, according to evidence in the Klein case.

    #Surveillance #USA #NSA #AT&T

  • BAE Systems Sells Internet Surveillance Gear to United Arab Emirates
    https://theintercept.com/2016/08/26/bae-systems-sells-internet-surveillance-gear-to-united-arab-emirates

    A Danish subsidiary of British defense contractor BAE Systems is selling an internet surveillance package to the government of the United Arab Emirates, a country known for spying on, imprisoning, and torturing dissidents and activists, according to documents obtained by Lasse Skou Andersen of the Danish newspaper Dagbladet Information. The documents from the Danish Business Authority reveal an ongoing contract between the defense conglomerate, BAE Systems Applied Intelligence A/S, and the (...)

    #BAE_Systems #surveillance #surveillance #surveillance #écoutes

  • Exclusive: UK’s secret Mid-East internet surveillance base is revealed in Edward Snowden leaks - UK Politics - UK - The Independent
    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/exclusive-uks-secret-mideast-internet-surveillance-base-is-revealed-i

    Britain runs a secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept and process vast quantities of emails, telephone calls and web traffic on behalf of Western intelligence agencies, The Independent has learnt.

    • http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/exclusive-uks-secret-mideast-internet-surveillance-base-is-revealed-i

      The data-gathering operation is part of a £1bn internet project still being assembled by GCHQ. It is part of the surveillance and monitoring system, code-named “Tempora”, whose wider aim is the global interception of digital communications, such as emails and text messages.

      Across three sites, communications – including telephone calls – are tracked both by satellite dishes and by tapping into underwater fibre-optic cables.

      Access to Middle East traffic has become critical to both US and UK intelligence agencies post-9/11. The Maryland headquarters of the NSA and the Defence Department in Washington have pushed for greater co-operation and technology sharing between US and UK intelligence agencies.

      The Middle East station was set up under a warrant signed by the then Foreign Secretary David Miliband, authorising GCHQ to monitor and store for analysis data passing through the network of fibre-optic cables that link up the internet around the world

      The certificate authorised GCHQ to collect information about the “political intentions of foreign powers”, terrorism, proliferation, mercenaries and private military companies, and serious financial fraud.

      However, the certificates are reissued every six months and can be changed by ministers at will. GCHQ officials are then free to target anyone who is overseas or communicating from overseas without further checks or controls if they think they fall within the terms of a current certificate.

      The precise budget for this expensive covert technology is regarded as sensitive by the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign Office.

      However, the scale of Middle East operation, and GCHQ’s increasing use of sub-sea technology to intercept communications along high-capacity cables, suggest a substantial investment.

      Intelligence sources have denied the aim is a blanket gathering of all communications, insisting the operation is targeted at security, terror and organised crime.

    • J’ai peut-être mal lu cet article, mais il me semble que ni Greenwald ni Snowden ne disent que l’information est fausse et/ou ne se trouverait pas dans les documents de Snowden.

      Ce qu’ils disent, c’est que :
      – Snowden n’a pas parlé au Independant,
      – que les journalistes avec lesquels Snowden travaille n’ont jamais livré ce genre d’informations, parce qu’elles ne seraient pas nécessaires au débat public et relèveraient de la trahison,
      – d’où l’idée que peut-être le Independant se ferait manipuler pour faire croire que Snowden livre au public des informations réellement « damaging ».

      Mais ce qu’ils ne disent pas, c’est que cette information serait fausse. Au contraire, pour incriminer Snowden, il faudrait que l’information soit « damaging », donc qu’elle soit véridique.

      (John Le Carré, si tu utilises ça, tu me cites s’il te plaît.)

  • Concern over NSA privacy violations unites Democrats and Republicans, poll finds
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/08/16/concern-over-nsa-privacy-violations-unites-democrats-and-republicans

    A July Washington Post-ABC News poll — before the latest disclosures reported by The Post — found fully 70 percent of Democrats and 77 percent of Republicans said the NSA’s phone and Internet surveillance program intrudes on some Americans’ privacy rights. What’s more, Democrats and Republicans who did see intrusions were about equally likely to say they were “not justified:” 51 and 52 percent respectively. Nearly six in 10 political independents who saw intrusions said they are unjustified.

  • How The Copyright Industry Pushed For Internet Surveillance

    The copyright industry drives a Big Brother society in order to force everybody to care for their obsolete business. I certainly don’t, and I certainly won’t. I think the idea is repulsive. But at the end of the day, it’s not really the copyright industry who is at fault for making obscene demands. They’re just spectacularly failed entrepreneurs. The real blame here lies with the politicians who blindly accept the obscene demands.

    http://torrentfreak.com/how-the-copyright-industry-pushed-for-internet-surveillance-130630

    #prism #hadopi #ipred

  • What to do if #Google warns of state-sponsored attack - Committee to Protect Journalists
    https://cpj.org/internet/2012/06/what-to-do-if-google-warns-of-state-sponsored-atta.php

    http://cpj.org/internet/google.attacker.use.jpg

    Faced with the news that an entire nation-state is apparently intent on hacking your computer, taking care to not open strange email attachments and watching a video about strong passwords may hardly seem sufficient.

    What follows is a little more explanation, based on CPJ’s experiences with journalist information security, about what Google may be seeing, and how you might defend yourself.

    #internet #surveillance #journalisme

  • Clean IT – Leak shows plans for large-scale, undemocratic surveillance of all communications | EDRI
    http://edri.org/cleanIT

    A leaked document from the #CleanIT project shows just how far internal discussions in that initiative have drifted away from its publicly stated aims, as well as the most fundamental legal rules that underpin European democracy and the rule of law.

    #internet #surveillance #répression #europe

    EU working group produces the stupidest set of proposed Internet rules in the entire history of the human race - Boing Boing
    http://boingboing.net/2012/09/25/eu-working-group-produces-the.html

    EU working group produces the stupidest set of proposed Internet rules in the entire history of the human race
    By Cory Doctorow at 10:59 pm Tuesday, Sep 25

    Cleansing the Internet of Terrorism: Leaked EU Proposal Would Erode Civil Liberties | Electronic Frontier Foundation
    https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/09/cleansing-internet-terrorism-leaked-eu-proposal-would-erode-civil-liberties

    The project, dubbed CleanIT, is funded by the European Commission (EC) to the tune of more than $400,000 and, it would appear, aims to eradicate the Internet of terrorism.

  • Sofrecom: the French company improving the Syrian Internet surveillance | KheOps
    http://reflets.info/sofrecom-the-french-company-improving-the-syrian-internet-surveillance

    (This is a translation from French of this article) Sofrecom very proudly celebrated their new contract with the Syrian Telecommunications Establishment in 2011. Even Christine Lagarde, who was at that time a French Minister, moved to Damascus for the celebration. On the Syrian side, the Syrian Prime Minister, Mr. Abdallah Dardari, also took part to the contract signature ceremony. While it is not a surprise to see a French company specialized in communications helping a foreign operator, one may wonder why our companies target so questionable markets in terms of Human Rights. The range of products and services of Sofrecom may let us think that they intervened on the « management » of the STE network. Sofrecom develop their activities in Africa, Middle-East, and Asia, and their offices in Dubai recently became the official headquarters for Sofrecom Middle-East. At Reflets, our natural tendancy to be suspicious made us take a closer look to the « Networks and services » activity of Sofrecom while checking the markets that the company targets. The business pages from the Sofrecom website provide a lot of information on the recent countries in which this subsidiary company of the France Telecom group (former national French telephone/Internet operator, close to the (...)