All About NSA's and AT&T's Big Brother Machine, the Narus 6400

All About NSA's and AT&T's Big Brother Machine, the Narus 6400

" Earlier today we found out that the EFF had sued AT&T over their secret work with the NSA on surveillance of millions of US citizens without wiretaps. We learned that paragraph 65 of this complaint shows EFF is trying to turn it into a nationwide Class Action suit covering all current and former customers (any after 9/2001) of AT&T. And we learned that a retired AT&T technician had stepped forward and disclosed the installation of secret NSA spy equipment in the San Francisco trunk facility. As well as the belief that similar equipment is in place in Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.

Specifically, this equipment was the Narus ST-6400, a machine that was capable of monitoring over 622 Mbits/second in real time in May, 2000, and capturing anything that hits its' semantice (i.e. the meaning of the content) triggers. The latest generation is called NarusInsight, capable of monitoring 10 billion bits of data per second."

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/4/8/14724/28476

Thats rather scary. Isn't that illegal?

From what I read, the NarusInsight, is a protocol analyzer, not a spech recognition system. It might be used to search for e-mail, IM, etc, but I sincerely doubt that it is able to handle 622 Mbits/second of speech.

Yes, it sucks that the NSA may actually be storing this message for further analysis simply because it has the words NSA, Security and Terrorist. I can't imagine them doing it effectively, since they'd have to read this whole thread to get it in context.

On the other hand.....

Court cases have decided that e-mail is no longer private as soon as you send it to an ISP for processing. You lose the expectation of privacy since it's out of your control. So for them to tap the e-mail at your ISP is totally lawful if they can get the ISP to co-operate.

I'm not sure why the law is set up this way. In essesnce, it says that if you trust someone to keep a secret, and the government wrests that secret from them, it was not really a secret anyway. It seems that no matter how hard you try to keep a secret, it's not considered a privacy issue if you lose the document or trust somone else to safeguard it.

I'm not sure, but I think that if you mail a letter, the contents are not protected under search and siezure laws either under the same concept.

I'd like to see the EFF succeed, if only to establish that e-mail is expected (by the common man) to be private and unreadable except by the recipient. After all, it's black magic to most.

Daniel