US Spies Have "Security Agreements" With Foreign Telecoms 181
McGruber writes "The Washington Post is reporting the existence of 'Team Telecom', lawyers from the FBI and the departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security, who ensure that Global Crossing and other foreign-owned telecoms, quickly and confidentially fulfill the USA's surveillance requests. Team Telecom leverages the authority of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to approve cable licenses. The security agreement for Global Crossing, whose fiber-optic network connected 27 nations and four continents, required the company to have a 'Network Operations Center' on U.S. soil that could be visited by government officials with 30 minutes of warning. Surveillance requests, meanwhile, had to be handled by U.S. citizens screened by the government and sworn to secrecy — in many cases prohibiting information from being shared even with the company's executives and directors. A spokesman for Level 3 Communications declined to comment for the Washington Post's article."
Re:Actually Protest This Shit (Score:2, Interesting)
Yup, in the few minutes it took to type that, AC already got in one of those bullshit comments.
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3945181&cid=44210277 [slashdot.org]
Pathetic. Be complacent now and we'll all look like goatse in a few years time, begging for more. And idiots like this AC are gently guiding our hands to our ankles.
No more complacency!
Re:Actually Protest This Shit (Score:2, Interesting)
Proper compliance (Score:5, Interesting)
There's at least one US cellular provider which annoys the FBI by obeying the law. They have a contact point for interception requests. That phone is answered by their lawyers, who check the validity of the request before anything happens. If it's an "emergency" request prior to a court order, they insist that the requesting law enforcement agent sign a form.
The form requires full identification of the law enforcement officer, their contact information, and their supervisor's contact information. The officer must certify that a proper court order will be requested and provided to the telco within a specified number of days. The law enforcement officer has to agree that their agency will indemnify the telco in the event of any later legal dispute, and that should the agency fail to do so, the officer will be personally responsible for any penalties or legal expenses incurred by the telco.
That's what CALEA says a telco is supposed to do. The FBI hates being accountable like that.
We long suspected this ... (Score:4, Interesting)
More added to the snowball that Edward Snowden started rolling. I accept that a certain amount of targetted monitoring is needed, but what we are being shown is on a different scale. What really annoys me is how the politicians have lied and told us that we should not worry our silly little heads. Now is the time to hold the politicians to account -- not accept the ''I will not discuss operations'' answers that they fob us off with. Time for honesty and heads to roll.
It will be interesting to see how much attention the mainstream media pay to this or if they will try to bury it.
Straight out of the Dictator's Handbook (Score:5, Interesting)
Dude, why so surprised? You read it here first:
http://dictatorshandbook.net/book/node237.html [dictatorshandbook.net]
From the dictator's handbook, chapter nine:
You own the hardware. Internet access passes through the infrastructure of your state-owned telecommunications systems, or at least the infrastructure of private telecoms that depend on your goodwill for their existence and continued operations. As such, you have a high degree of control over what information enters and exits your national territory. The Chinese have proven you can safely filter out âoeharmfulâ information from the outside without stifling economic activity.[180]
You control the purse-strings. The Internet is run by corporations, and corporations are most influenced by economic, not political considerations. Google was forced out of China by economics, not human rights concerns; both Twitter and Facebook have refused to join the Global Network Initiative (an organization focused on the right to expression and privacy). Research in Motion (RIM) offered access to its otherwise encrypted and protected messaging servers as soon as Bahrain asked for them, prompting other nations to do the same.9.1
No better resource than the Internet has ever existed with which an individualâ(TM)s life and movements can be tracked via their cyber footprints by any curious autocrat. Imperial Russiaâ(TM)s Okhrana, the East German Stasi, and the Soviet KGB: each was feared for its ability to track and monitor its prey. But they would be astonished with how much easier technology has made their work.
Re:Actually Protest This Shit (Score:5, Interesting)
My wife and I have a rule that we began applying last election cycle. If there is any doubt about a particular race that we are voting on (after doing research on each candidate, of course), we apply a simple formula--vote the incumbent out.
Foreign telecoms? ? ? ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Should be rather obvious by this time. . .
Re:Who built SeLinux? (Score:4, Interesting)
It wasn't NSA, it was DARPA. And that doesn't prove anything bad was happening. Look into the history of DES encryption sometime. There was a controversy because NSA changed the S-boxes used in the encryption before the design was finalized and accepted for government use. Nobody knew why at the time, and I've never heard that the government explained why the change. Many people were suspicious, thinking that the change would create some sort of exploitable weakness. DES has been analyzed to death and when used at the designed spec in terms of number of rounds of encryption, etc., there isn't much in terms of weaknesses other than key length. The one thing that has emerged was that DES was unusually resistant to differential cryptanalysis which was discovered in the academic world many years after DES was released. (~20) It turns out that IBM was aware of it at the time they were designing DES, and NSA asked them to say nothing. So it appears that NSA knew about differential cryptanalysis 20+ years before the academic world, and specifically strengthened DES against it by altering the S-box design values.
There is some history in this paper.
Extended Analysis of DES S-boxes [kuleuven.be]