Could FReepmail be used by terrorist

eastforker ^ | 1/18/04 | Eastforker

[eastforker]

This is a question for those that know. Do the security agencies have a way to monitor private replys on this and other forums on the internet? If not, we may have a security breach that has not been addressed.

[Hillary's Lovely Legs]

[_Jim]

SMS and pagers are a fraction of email traffic. Monitored. Count on it.

Funny ... they never allocated any trunks out of the MTSO to do that on though ...

[_Jim]

The total cost of terrestrial communictaions monitoring is cheap, too,

Another old 'wives tale' - overblown in it's ease and purported wide-spread use.

I'm *still* waiting for somebody to 'run the numbers' on the required 'backhaul' to xport all this data to some central 'point' (SINCE no such 'monitoring' devices exist for wholesale monitoring in the COs or MTSOs) ...

[I got the rope]

I just blew tea all over my laptop! LOL.

[maui_hawaii]

To answer your question...if the feds want you they can get you. No use running. I like Jim's advice to not post anything thats going to embarrass yourself though.

Now, I see from your profile you are in Texas.

If I am not mistaken Jim and his server is in California.

There is a lot of distance between those two places.

Your private reply must first go through your ISP and all across who knows where before it gets on the board.

If the Feds are after you they will tap the line going into your house and thats that.

Not to mention that your ISP will have to talk to say my ISP for your "private" message to get to me.

Anywhere along the line you ...could... would get caught should you decide to post anything worthy of a response from those guys.

The NSA targets key areas where internet traffic is routed through and goes from there. They keep their foot print to a minimum but can cover LOTS of ground.

[Sir_Ed]

"Blah, blah, blah. If you have your decoder ring and know the secret word of the day...no problemo."

The secret word is Sycophant.

"Would you be safer in a farm house with 5 members of the Religion of Peace, or in your own house being monitored by John Ashcroft? Ask Daniel Pearl."

I would be safer being stopped at every major intersection, being questioned by the police without probable cause, with every email being read regardless of circumstance, oh...I forgot, that's what YOU guys believe, not I.

"Oh, and give us a call when your rights are violated."

When I'm pulled over without probable cause, like the Supreme Court just allowed; when my emails are read without probable cause; when I encounter roadblocks that are but fishing expeditions; when I cannot join with like-minded individuals to place ads on TV that criticize politicians 60 days before an election and when a simple question at Staples about Microsoft's Flight Simulator brings federal agents to my door at 8 pm that evening, as recently happens, then I have already lost my rights.

But that prolly doesn't concern you much...oh well.

"We'll be waiting by the phone."

I'll just post it here, and save us the necessity of further convo.

Ed

[maui_hawaii]

Lets say you log into FR as a new user in the public library.

If they have someone really on top of it, they could tell which terminal you used to send the message in about an hour. Or less.

Sorting the messages is the trick. It depends on how high up the OS scale your post gets kicked.

(OS="Oh Sh#t!)

[Fabozz]

"Could FReepmail be used by terrorist"

Not since A+Bert got banned.

[maui_hawaii]

The NSA doesn't bother with most people. Its not really a huge sweeping kind of thing.

First off, by law they cannot look at the stuff of a US citizen. Of course they have procedures for determining whats what.

They target certain people or places and go from there. If they are on your @ss don't worry. If they know who you are and where you're at...

Too bad for you.

[maui_hawaii]

My p/c is plugged into a 7-11 payphone.

You gotta watch that movie Enemy of the State starring Will Smith...

That will teach you.

[G.Mason]

"You gotta watch that movie Enemy of the State starring Will Smith..."

"That will teach you."

I will take you up on that.

Thanks for the tip.

[G.Mason]

"....... when I encounter roadblocks that are but fishing expeditions ....... "

Not to be argumentatuve, but that has been going on for over 40 years, that I know of.

It was policy, when I was on the job, to have roadblocks, and check out drivers for credentials, and outstanding warrants.

I'm not saying I agreed with that policy, I'm simply stating that this isn't anything new.

[eno_]

Domestic voice calls are (probably) not monitored wholesale at COs. The legal requirement for LI capacity out of any significant node is, IIRC, 1%. Wholesale monitoring, if it is being done, would be done one or two levels up the hierarchy, or on the metro fiber ring carring calls between COs. The very nature of SONET switches means you can "tap" them by provisioning a redundant link.

Internet backbone routers were not built with an LI capability in mind BUT you can copy ALL the data going in an out of a backbone router if you want to with no impact on performance. Some specialized edge routers have LI interfaces.

Backhaul costly? Nah. Look at all the unused fiber. You might run out of fibers and lambdas in Manhattan, but there are very few places where plenty of backhaul capacity isn't available. The highest capacity interfaces on backbone routers are not yet widely deployed, and most routers in the field have open slots that could be used to monitor data.

How many routers would an agency need to "tap?" Well that number has gone up from a handful when everything went through the MAEs. I'd guess copying the traffic out of 50-70 backbone routers at the "provider edge" of each major backbone network would get you 80%+ coverage of Internet traffic.

Back to cost: Let's say that would mean $20k in gear at each node monitored. So let's round up the total to $2M. Low? Double it. Double it again. Again. Very do-able for agencies that build multi-billion dollar titanium submarines just to see if it is possible to tap into submarine fiber optic cables.

The big expense is, of course, the boxes that sift through all these bits. If the Internet is is being heavily monitored, somewhere there is an interesting architecture of interesting machines (Paracel, Mercury, maybe Snowshore) sorting through all those bits. Still, even if each of those DSP-array machines cost $1M, you could buy a few thousand of them for the price of one of those titanium submarines (and the operating costs would be lower, too).

Oh, and who would anyone BOTHER to tap pagers in the terrertrial network. Any "prosumer" could buy a handful or radios that would do it. I'm sure radio hobbyists monitor their metro area pager traffic just for grins.

[_Jim]

I've put off rebutting this post long enough - it's bad enough it's full of misconceptions in a number of areas, not the least of whic is the comment about excess carrying capacity simply being used presumably by gov't for back haul:

Backhaul costly? Nah. Look at all the unused fiber. You might run out of fibers and lambdas in Manhattan, but there are very few places where plenty of backhaul capacity isn't available. The highest capacity interfaces on backbone routers are not yet widely deployed, and most routers in the field have open slots that could be used to monitor data.

Your suggestion is tantamount to gov't takeover of civilian assets/'quartering of troops in private residences' - a nogo all the way around .. also OVERLOOKED are the resources at each end (the tandems, the switches, the routers) required to 'handle' that fiber *plus* the man-hours in the way of network engineering personnel to set up (provision) these 'circuits'.

NONE of this happens by itself, ergo, without cost being incurred somewhere ...

YOU also over look the need to intelligently 'monitor' such trunks/fiber whether it be SONET etc ... simply looking at raw bits on those circuits is meaningless, unless you have access to the provisioning that was done on the SS7 links and networks/and know which virtual circuits are being USED for call "set up' - and THEN you may only be getting trunk 'set up' info and little phonbe-number associated information.

'Pager' networks, BTW, have advanced a LONG ways since the days of the one-frequency/whole city coverage days.

Nowadays, with the new "Assured Messaging" pagers (1 1/2 and 2-way models) actual 'paging zones' are set up and a pager will 'register' (MUCH like a cell phones 'registers' in the current cell it's in) - what this means is that multiple pager receivers at several sites would be required to provide 100% assured 'coverage' SINCE only messages destined for thos particular pagers who have registered will be transmitted in that 'cell'. This cuts down unnecessary over-the-air traffic INCLUDING state-wide 'paging' for those that have a 'state' or 'nationwide' paging account.

Anyway, nice 'word-salad' overall - but inadequate and erroneous in several key, critical areas ...

[eno_]

SS7 is something like 0.01% of traffic. SS7 protocol stacks are a commodity item. Buy one off the Sun ISV catalog. What used to be an impressive bit of real time computation is now no sweat for a nice phat Sun server, which is what you'll find in many modern COs.

Even the voice processing is getting cheap. Snowshore built a box that could do tens of thousands of IVR/speech-processing channels in half a rack.

Comprehensive surveillance is very do-able for less than what it cost to put a buggy VxWorks system on Mars.

[eno_]

You are right, though, that if you want to bug Blackberry-type 2-way pagers you would have to do it in the terrestrial network. Still, that's a pimple on the back of a flea in terms of volume of data.

[_Jim]

SS7 is something like 0.01% of traffic. SS7 protocol stacks are a commodity item.

Not to the telcos, not to the *cellular* industry - callers/call setup SSP and HLR all dedicate SS7 links for 'traffic' associated with call handling ...

Nice dodge, but, this still doesn't alleviate the requirement that your 'monitoring' of a traffic on a SONET link (or whatever) is going to require some knowledge of those links and associated trunk names to make any sense of the voice traffic on the virtual 'voice trunks'.

This discussion, after all, was about gov't eavesdropping wholesale wherein I am providing argument on the intracies involved. We aren't talking strictly about the cost, the standardization, or the 'commodity' status of this stuff ....

[Interesting Times]

"The zebras are in the trees."

-- message repeats:

"The zebras are in the trees."

[TBall]

Tomorrow, treacle will turn to brandy.

[TBall]

Tomorrow, treacle will turn to brandy.