Feds Have a High-Speed Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier 229
An anonymous reader writes "An unnamed U.S. wireless carrier maintains an unfiltered, unmonitored DS-3 line from its internal network to a facility in Quantico, Virginia, according to Babak Pasdar, a computer security consultant who did work for the company in 2003. Customer voice calls, billing records, location information and data traffic are all allegedly exposed. A similar claim was leveled against Verizon Wireless in a 2006 lawsuit."
Re:CALEA (Score:5, Interesting)
NEWS FLASH: EVERY wireline and wireless carrier has facility like this between their central offices and Quantico, Virginia. I can tell you for an absolute fact that a medium-sized cable company operating in the Rocky Mountain region has similar facilities between their main office and the FBI Academy, because I helped install it.
Welcome to the world post-CALEA.
Re:CALEA (Score:5, Interesting)
Use the Goog. It's your friend.
Re:CALEA (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:And the loyal opposition, the Democrats, will.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Because thanks to him, the Democrats have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. Literally. As in, they were criticizing the prescription drug boondoggle as going to far. When is that supposed to kick in, anyway?
And they got their education bill: "No Child Left Behind" was co-written by senator Edward "water under the bridge" Kennedy.
Technically, Bush got his tax cuts through, I guess, but taxes are an merely an inflation-control measure. Spending is where the real problems start, and he didn't get any cuts at all on that front. In fact, he presided over the largest expansion of the federal government since FDR!
And do you really think that Democrats were opposed to federalizing airport security screeners? More fodder for the government employees' union.
I do wonder, though, what Gore would've done post 9/11. I imagine that domestically, it would be very similar to what Bush has done. Only difference I'd guess is that Gore would probably have bombed afghanistan right away, and then considered that the end of it on the foreign agenda side.
who's in trouble (Score:2, Interesting)
I say this as a privacy advocate, but (Score:1, Interesting)
It doesn't add up (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Do the math (Score:2, Interesting)
With overhead- throughput on a DS3 is only about 43Mbps. All things considered- that's not a very large pipe (tube?) at all, especially considering the amount of traffic it would have to carry for wholesale surveillance. There are a lot of small to mid-sized companies that have OC3s, including mine. You can get one for only around $3k/month with the right carrier/contract. If anything- an OC-3 would be slightly more impressive, but considering the millions of customers and transactions that would need to be monitored- that also is unlikely.
I'm with several others- I think the story is BS. For them to actually do what everyone is paranoid about- they would probably need an OC-24 (~1.2Gbps) from every single large data center/central office in the country. They would also need a lot of CPU cycles and manpower to actually monitor that traffic.
I'm not saying they don't, but it does make a single DS3 from one carrier seem pretty irrelevant. If they are doing it- I'd love to see their QoS implementation in action.
You are kidding. (Score:2, Interesting)
So if a bunch of sleazoids in Virginia want to listen to your daughter talk dirty to her boyfriend, there's no way to know and even if you did, nothing you can do about it.
And yet the remedy is legislative? Really? Yeah, if we pass a law to forbid casual spying on domestic citizens for no reason other than prurient interest, that'll take care of it!
I feel safer already.
Re:CALEA (Score:3, Interesting)
Every single design for a new piece of telecom equipment includes provisions for lawful intercept. That provision working is more important than any other piece of the system. It can ship even if it is rebooting every 24 hours, but it won't ship if lawful intercept isn't working 100%.