Sandvine Scraps Plan To Market Tool in US That Tracks Encrypted Messages (bloomberg.com) 7
Computer networking company Sandvine has scrapped an effort to sell US law enforcement agencies a controversial internet surveillance technology that tracks encrypted messages and laid off most of the employees involved in the initiative, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing four people with knowledge of the matter. From the report: Sandvine had pitched the new product, called "Digital Witness," to governments and law enforcement agencies in Europe, the Middle East, Asia and North America. It was marketed as a tool to covertly monitor people's internet use and encrypted messages sent using popular applications such as Meta Platform's WhatsApp and Signal, according to the people, who asked not to be identified to discuss confidential matters.
Sandvine had already provided trial versions of the technology in the US, these people said. But a combination of broader economic woes and lingering concern over the company's previous work with authoritarian governments hindered the product's success, the people said. Sandvine declined to comment when asked about Digital Witness. The company's marketing materials indicate the product is sold only to law enforcement and government agencies, and it is still listed on Sandvine's website.
Sandvine had already provided trial versions of the technology in the US, these people said. But a combination of broader economic woes and lingering concern over the company's previous work with authoritarian governments hindered the product's success, the people said. Sandvine declined to comment when asked about Digital Witness. The company's marketing materials indicate the product is sold only to law enforcement and government agencies, and it is still listed on Sandvine's website.
WITNESS ME! (Score:2)
Maybe Sandvine just couldn't source enough of that silver spray paint.
So the NSA will develop it (Score:2)
And will pay Silvervine for the source code etc. After all they have a working version. And I'm sure the developers will be happy to transfer to the NSA...
Snake Oil (Score:2)
Encrypted messages are not that hard to identify. Encryption and compression are measureably high entropy. Compression is identifiably different from encryption.
If you limit yourself to WhatsApp and Signal, it's even easier
It couldn't have been breaking the encyption, just saying "encrypted". Duh, it's S
Re: (Score:2)
Identifying obviously encrypted messages is pretty easy - especially from well-known apps like Signal and WhatsApp.
What they're selling is the connection map - who's exchanging encrypted messages with whom. Tells a government about 90% of the people that they want to surreptitiously monitor, and provides some intel based on traffic statistics - "The 'terror cell' in western downtown is sending 3 times as many messages as normal, after the leadership exchanged twice as many messages as normal last week".
What
Re: Snake Oil (Score:2)
Many assertions here. Got a source?
Room 641A (Score:4, Interesting)
Just one such example of why the gov doesn't need to buy a service like this...
Now though, I would like to ask you all about a story I read in a newsgroup ~20yrs ago:
So a guy claimed to be "basically a netadmin your ISP's ISP" (iirc). He said that his connections between ISPs were always reliable and had consistent latency, let's say 5-6ms. It was very rare to have any unscheduled outages, that he'd never had both primary and redundant links go down. He'd never lost connection to more than one ISP at a time.
So he says one night Everything went down all at once for a short time (I dont remember but seconds i think). He asked his counterparts at other ISPs, and they all experienced the same. When everything came back online, avg latency was now 6-7ms, 1ms slower, and remained that way for the rest if his tenure.
Does that sound familiar or plausible to anyone? I'm sorry I don't remember or know enough to explain better.