THE SHADOW FACTORY
The Ultra Secret NSA from 9/11 to the To The Eavesdropping on America
BY JAMES BAMFORD
Wiretappers
The Ultra Secret NSA from 9/11 to the To The Eavesdropping on America
BY JAMES BAMFORD
Wiretappers
Just across busy Interstate 395 from the Pentagon, Crystal City is a
beehive of overweight contractors, military personnel in ill-fitting civilian
clothes, and spooks behind Ray-Ban aviation-style sunglasses. In
restaurants, walking down sidewalks, or filling up at gas stations, nearly
everyone has a stack of playing-card-size badges hanging on black straps
around their necks. Prestige is measured not in the make of their jeans, or
the cut of their suits, but by the color and number of their badges, worn
like battle ribbons from some secret war.
Once a desolate land of junkyards, drive-in movie theaters, used-car
lots, and towing companies, crisscrossed by rusted railroad tracks, this
area was transformed by the developer Robert H. Smith in the 1960's.
Hoping to give his new community a fresh image, he hung an elaborate
crystal chandelier in the lobby of the first building and named it Crystal
House. Thereafter, every other building took on the Crystal theme—Crystal
Gateway, Crystal Towers—until the entire area became Crystal City.
Like the nature of the work that goes on there, much of the city is hidden
from view.
On one level, Crystal City is a modern vertical village of sixty thousand
daytime workers cocooned in odd-shaped domino's of glass, brick,
and cement. Bland office towers connect to bland hotels that connect to
bland no-name government high-rises. But below the buildings, streets,
and sidewalks is a hidden, underground city of chophouses and flower decorated
boutiques, sushi dens and shoe repair shops. It is a place where people just back from the Green Zone bump into one another and others
on their way to Afghanistan pick up electric transformers and have their
body armor tailored.
Crystal City was thus an ideal venue for the Wiretappers’ Ball. Known
formally as the Intelligence Support System World Conference, it is a
once-a-year secretive conclave of engineers and scientists in search of the
ultimate bug. It is the place to come to discuss the latest developments
in mass surveillance, how to listen in on entire continents at the least
cost, and the best ways to tap into—or shut down—the newest Internet
phone system. Picking up shiny brochures at booths and listening to the
lectures are an assortment of doctoral-level computer scientists; electrical
engineers with decades in the telecom business; government agents from
superpowers and mini-states, democracies and dictatorships; and wealthy
venture capitalists and start-up owners trying to impress them. The one
group conspicuously absent is anyone even remotely connected to the
media—a policy enforced by linebackers with earplugs and bulges under
their blue blazers.
In 2006, the three-day Wiretappers’ Ball was held in Crystal City’s
Hilton in late May. A sense of the atmosphere can be gleaned from the
highly confidential program of lectures. On Monday, May 22, at 4:00, one
could attend a talk on “Combining Data and Voice over Broadband into a
Unified Interception Solution” given by an employee of Verint Systems.
On Tuesday at 1:30, another Verint employee addressed “Broadening the
Scope of Interception: Data Retention.” A half hour later an employee
of Agilent Technologies spoke about “Comprehensive Data Extraction
for Flexible and Accurate Intelligence.” Then at 2:45, still another Verint
worker discussed “Comprehensive Solutions for Packet Data Collection:
DEEPVIEW.” “Verint’s DEEPVIEW,” said the description of the talk, “is
a packet data collection system with the comprehensive functionality to
penetrate deep into communications and turn raw, intercepted data into
actionable intelligence and compelling evidence.”
And on Wednesday, at 10:15, an employee of NICE Systems addressed
the topic of “Unifying Telephony, VoIP and IP Interception for a
Complete Overview of Your Target’s Interactions.” For those still awake,
another Verint worker then took on the topic of “Challenges of Implementing
Passive Interception for I.M.S [Instant Message Systems].” Next,
the company NSC discussed locating keywords in masses of information in a lecture titled “NSC Spotter.” “NSC’s Key-Word Spotting (K.W.S)
engine,” said a company employee, “is designed for locating predefined
words in audio conversations in real-time and off-line calls. The engine is
used for speech analytics and call surveillance.”
This hidden-from-view bugging industry got its start as a result of the
passage of C.A.L.E.A in 1994. The law mandated the telecom companies
to configure their networks to supply the government with intercepts authorized
by a court-issued warrant. But following the attacks on 9/11 and
President Bush’s secret order to begin massive warrant less eavesdropping,
the industry began a period of explosive growth. Not only were
sales booming, so was the competition to build bigger and better “mass
surveillance systems” that incorporated both nationwide interception capabilities
and advanced data-mining techniques. Once built, the systems
were sold to whoever would buy them, including some of the most repressive
and authoritarian governments on the planet.
Closer to home, America’s two major telecom companies, AT&T and
Verizon, have outsourced the bugging of their entire networks—carrying
billions of American communications every day—to two mysterious
companies with very troubling foreign connections. In AT&T’s secret
room in San Francisco, a mirror image of all data entering the building
is filtered through surveillance equipment supplied and maintained by
Narus. Verizon, which controls most of the rest of the country’s domestic
and international communications networks, chose a different company.
According to knowledgeable sources, that company is Verint.
According to these sources, in 2006 Verizon constructed its “secret
room” on the second floor of a nondescript two-story building at 14503
Luthe Road in Houston, Texas. Once Verizon receives watch-listed names
from the NSA, it then reroutes their Internet communications into that
room, which is packed with secret Verint machines and software. After
passing through the Verint hardware, the messages are then transmitted in
real time to a central government surveillance hub in Sterling, Virginia.
Run by the FBI, the hub is a newly built annex for the bureau’s Engineering
Research Facility (E.R.F), located on the grounds of the FBI
Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Among the technologies developed by
E.R.F is Carnivore, later given the more benign-sounding name D.C.S-1000,
which is a sophisticated Internet “packet sniffer.” While Verint and Narus
sift through traffic at key Internet gateways around the country, Carnivore, or one of its successors, is used when the target has been narrowed
down to a smaller, individual ISP. Thus, if Verint detects that a target is
a subscriber to a small California-based Internet provider, the FBI can
install its D.C.S-1000 at the company’s office to record his activity. The
device can also transmit the data back to the FBI in real time. An encrypted
T1 cable connects the E.R.F Annex in Sterling directly to the NSA
at Fort Meade.
Follow-on projects to the D.C.S-1000 include the D.C.S-5000, which is
designed for F.I.S.A surveillance; the D.C.S-3000 for pen register (a device
used to record all numbers dialed from a tapped phone) and trap-and-trace
taps; and the D.C.S-6000, nicknamed Digital Storm, which intercepts the
contents of phone calls and text messages. Once the information is sent
back to the E.R.F, it is indexed and prioritized by the bureau’s Electronic
Surveillance (E.L.S.U.R) Data Management System. Other eavesdropping
tools in the FBI’s toolbox include a collection of intrusive spyware such
as C.I.P.A.V, which stands for Computer and Internet Protocol Address Verifier.
The program can be remotely implanted into a target computer to
secretly send back to intelligence agents key details about the machine,
including its IP address, operating system type, Internet browser, and a
list of active programs. The C.I.P.A.V then transforms itself into a cyber pen
register, logging the address information of every computer with which
it comes into contact and then transmitting the details back to the E.R.F
Annex in Sterling.
Another remotely installed and operated program, Magic Lantern, has
the capability of recording and transmitting back in real time the target’s
every keystroke. Both spyware programs have likely been used on foreign
targets, but only C.I.P.A.V appears to have been used domestically thus
far. It was implanted in a target’s MySpace account, and when he opened
it, it launched in his system.
While Verizon’s data network is centrally tapped at Luthe Road in
Houston, it appears that the voice network is monitored from the company’s
sprawling facility on Hidden Ridge Avenue in Irving, Texas, near
Dallas. It is there that the company’s Global Security Operations Center
keeps tabs on the entire Verizon system, looking for fraud. According to
a sworn affidavit by Babak Pasdar, a computer security expert who has
worked as a contractor for a number of major telecoms, he discovered
a mysterious D.S-3 line at the heart of one company’s system—a link labeled “Quantico Circuit.” His description of the company and the link
seems to match that of Verizon as outlined in a lawsuit against the company.
“The circuit was tied to the organization’s core network,” Pasdar
said. “It had access to the billing system, text messaging, fraud detection,
website, and pretty much all the systems in the data center without
apparent restrictions.” He added, “Everyone was uncomfortable talking
about it.”
While such tools as D.C.S-1000 and C.I.P.A.V are used on a small number
of select targets, Verint and Narus are super intrusive—conducting mass
surveillance on both international and domestic communications 24/7.
What is especially troubling, but little known, is that both companies have
extensive ties to a foreign country, Israel, as well as links to that country’s
intelligence service—a service with a long history of aggressive spying
against the U.S. Equally troubling, the founder and former chairman of
one of the companies is now a fugitive, wanted by the FBI on nearly three
dozen charges of fraud, theft, lying, bribery, money laundering, and other
crimes. Although there has long been Congressional oversight of the telecom
industry, there is virtually no oversight of the companies hired to do
the bugging.
Verint was founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer, Jacob Alexander,
who often goes by the nickname “Kobi.” His father, Zvi Alexander,
was a wealthy Israeli oil baron and an international wheeler-dealer who
ended up running the country’s state-owned oil company. To win drilling
franchises, he would make political payments to African cabinet ministers,
often in partnership with the U.S. tax cheat Marc Rich, who became
a fugitive and was given sanctuary in Israel. In his autobiography, the
senior Alexander ridiculed America for criminalizing the bribery of foreign
officials. The U.S., he wrote, is “very sanctimonious” and “refuses
to accept the facts of life in the developing world.”
Like his father, Kobi was also interested in making millions. After
earning a degree in economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
in 1977 and spending several years in Israeli intelligence, he moved to
New York, where he worked as an investment banker at Shearson Loeb
Rhoades (now Smith Barney) while attending New York University at
night for his MBA in finance.
Soon after completing his degree in 1980, Alexander returned to Israel
and formed a voice- and fax-messaging company with two other Israelis, Boaz Misholi and his brother-in-law, Yechiam Yimini. Called Efrat, the
start-up was financed in part with subsidies from the Israeli government.
Four years later, the three returned to New York and opened a company
called Comverse, which was also incorporated in Israel. Its name a blend
of “communications” and “versatility,” Comverse became heavily involved
in wireless technology, voice-mail software, and other areas of
the telecom sector.
While deal making was taking place in the U.S., the secretive research
and development was done in Comverse Technology’s Israeli headquarters.
Surrounded by sushi bars, gourmet coffee places, and a kosher McDonald’s,
the research center and other facilities are located in a cluster
of seven buildings on Habarzel Street in Tel Aviv’s high-tech Ramat Hahayal
industrial park. In Israel, Alexander had become widely celebrated
for his telecom fortune. “Kobi was an Israeli hero, one of our real high tech
pioneers,” said Ron Tira, a Tel Aviv–based mutual fund manager
with investments in Comverse.
One of the new products being developed in Tel Aviv was a digital
surveillance device called AudioDisk that could monitor and record hundreds
of telephone and fax machine lines simultaneously. The machine
made the old reel-to-reel tape recorders obsolete: the data could be stored
in “jukeboxes” and be available to the user instantly. The use of digital
technology also meant that a key word or phrase could be located immediately,
rather than by rewinding the tape to the right spot. The system
was a major hit with intelligence agencies and police units in the U.S.
and around the world, and ended up bringing in half of the company’s
revenues in 1993. Eventually, the business was spun off into a separate
subsidiary called Comverse Infosys.
The security surge that followed the attacks on 9/11 sent the value
of the company skyrocketing. Five months after the attacks, Alexander
renamed the subsidiary Verint Systems, Inc. (short for Verified Intelligence),
took over as chairman, and made plans to take it public. Named
president and CEO was Dan Bodner, a former Israeli army engineer with
degrees from the Technion and Tel Aviv University, and nearly fifteen
years of experience at Comverse.
Soon, Verint was selling its “actionable intelligence solutions” to
“more than 5,000 organizations in over 100 countries” around the world,
according to the company, including the most repressive. For Kobi Alexander the war on terror was a boom time. He purchased a number of
expensive condominiums in a luxury high-rise on New York’s West 57th
Street, bought a 25 percent stake in Tel Aviv’s basketball team, entertained
clients at Knicks games at Madison Square Garden, and bragged
he could borrow oodles of money with a few business ideas scribbled on
a napkin. No matter how much he had, Alexander’s deep pockets could
always hold more—and he decided the U.S. was the place to get it.
As his Israeli engineers in Tel Aviv built bigger and better bugs, Alexander
wanted to attract the rapidly expanding U.S. intelligence community.
He thus placed the former NSA director Lieutenant General Ken
Minihan on the company’s “security committee” and soon the NSA and
other parts of the spy world were signing on. Then came the contract
to install its machines at the heart of the Verizon network, the nation’s
second-largest telecom company. The Verint system chosen was STARGATE.
“With STAR-GATE,” says the company’s sales literature, “service
providers can access communications on virtually any type of network,
retain communication data for as long as required, and query and deliver
content and data . . . Designed to manage vast numbers of targets, concurrent
sessions, call data records, and communications, STAR-GATE
transparently accesses targeted communications without alerting subscribers
or disrupting service. Verint partners with leading switch and
network equipment vendors across the globe to deliver passive, active,
and hybrid solutions for a wide range of communication services and
communication technologies . . . STAR-GATE can easily be customized
to operate with any switch or storage platform type, model, or software
version and can be easily integrated into any environment. Its modular
architecture facilitates simple upgrade or adaptation to meet the demands
of new communication protocols and technologies.”
During a conference call with investors, company president and CEO
Dan Bodner gave some examples of how customers used the company’s
mass interception equipment. One sounded like the NSA: “A multi million dollar
expansion order for our Communications Interception Solution for
an international government agency customer. This government customer
is deploying our solution to enhance national security by improving its
ability to intercept information, collect it from wireless, wire line, and
cable networks.” Another sounded like Verizon. “Examples of recent orders for Verint’s STAR-GATE solution for service providers include . . . a
multi million-dollar expansion order for a U.S. wireless service provider.”
Another could be Mexico or another of Verint’s one hundred country customers.
“An order for our Communications Interception Solution for a
new government agency customer in a new country for Verint. This new
customer is deploying our solution country-wide to enhance the national
security by intercepting and analyzing mass amounts of voice and data
collected from wireless networks.”
Thus, by 2004, a large percentage of America’s—and the world’s—
voice and data communications were passing through wiretaps built,
installed, and maintained by a small, secretive Israeli company run by
former Israeli military and intelligence officers. Even more unnerving is
the fact that Verint can automatically access the mega-terabytes of stored
and real-time data secretly and remotely from anywhere, including Israel.
This was revealed in a closed-door hearing in Australia, another one of
Verint’s customers. The hearing was held because Verint’s system had
been called “a lemon” by the Australian government and they were about
to get rid of it. In a last-minute attempt to salvage the contract, company
executives flew to Australia to plead their case.
One of the problems that most concerned a government watchdog
group, the Corruption and Crime Commission (C.C.C) Subcommittee,
was the fact that while they themselves had difficulty getting access to
the intercepted data, Verint was accessing the data remotely from thousands
of miles away. “The CCC,” said subcommittee member Graham
Giffard, “has some issues,” including “the fact that your company is foreign
owned . . . and that you can access data from overseas but the C.C.C
seems restricted in its ability to access data within that system.” Zvi Fischler,
the company’s Tel Aviv–based vice president for marketing and
sales, admitted the company conducts such activities. “We sometimes
operate by remote access,” he said. “We connect to the system from remote
in order to download some software.” The explanation didn’t seem
to satisfy the Australian officials, however, and Fischler agreed to stop.
“If the C.C.C finds it inappropriate to allow such access, we will of course
not do it this way,” he said.
At the time, Verint in Australia was tapping only phone calls, but Fischler
offered to expand the monitoring system to include the Internet.
“Specifically addressing additional capacity,” he said, “one issue could be increasing the capacity in terms of number of interceptions. That is easily
done. It could be done in a matter of a few weeks. Another upgrade that
has already been offered is to increase the capacity to intercept different
types of traffic that are not intercepted now. I mentioned broadband Internet
access from the Internet service providers. We have indeed offered
this kind of capacity increase.”
While Verint can provide mass interception of data and phone calls,
one of its Israeli spinoffs, PerSay, can go one step further and offer “advanced
voice mining.” The company, based in Tel Aviv, employs a system
“that efficiently searches for a target’s voice within a large volume
of intercepted calls, regardless of the conversation content or method
of communication.” Thus, with remote access to the internal and international
voice and data communications of over one hundred countries
around the world, including the United States, Verint’s headquarters in
Tel Aviv has a capability rivaled only by NSA’s, if not greater, especially
when coupled with PerSay’s voice-mining capability.
PerSay is an example of how close and interconnected these companies
are with Israel’s intelligence community—a factor of great concern
considering how much of their bugging equipment is now secretly hardwired
into the American telecommunications system. Among those on
PerSay’s board of directors is Arik Nir,[L] a former senior official in Shin
Bet, Israel’s internal security service. Nir is also the managing director of
PerSay’s financial backer, Athlone Global Security, which counts former
Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy[R] on its advisory board. Athlone was one
of the companies in the NSA’s “incubator,” the Chesapeake Innovation
Center in Annapolis, Maryland.
Although there is no evidence of cooperation, the greatest potential
beneficiaries of this marriage between the Israeli eavesdroppers and
America’s increasingly centralized telecom grid are Israel’s intelligence
agencies. “There is a huge, aggressive, ongoing set of Israeli intelligence activities directed against the United States,” a former intelligence
official told Los Angeles Times reporters Bob Drogin and Greg Miller
in 2004. “Anybody who worked in counterintelligence in a professional
capacity will tell you the Israelis are among the most aggressive and active
countries targeting the United States.” The former official discounted
repeated Israeli denials that the country exceeded acceptable limits to
obtain information. “They undertake a wide range of technical operations and human operations,” he said. “The denials are laughable.” In 2005,
Lawrence A. Franklin, a senior Pentagon official, pled guilty to spying
for Israel, and in 2008 two top officials of Israel’s U.S. lobby, A.I.P.A.C, are
scheduled for trial on similar charges.
The agency responsible for worldwide eavesdropping in Israel is the
hyper secret Unit 8200, that country’s NSA. “Unit 8200 is the technology
intel unit of the Israeli Defense Forces Intelligence Corps,” said Unit
veteran Gil Kerbs. “In Israel,” he said, “one’s academic past is somehow
less important than the military past. One of the questions asked in every
job interview is: Where did you serve in the army? . . When it comes
to high-tech jobs, nothing can help you more than the sentence, ‘I’m an
8200 alumnus.’ "
According to a former chief of Unit 8200, both the veterans of the
group and much of the high-tech intelligence equipment they developed
are now employed in high-tech firms around the world. “Cautious estimates
indicate that in the past few years,” he told a reporter for the Israeli
newspaper Ha’aretz in 2000, “Unit 8200 veterans have set up some 30
to 40 high-tech companies, including 5 to 10 that were floated on Wall
Street.” Referred to only as “Brigadier General B,” he added, “This correlation
between serving in the intelligence unit 8200 and starting successful
high-tech companies is not coincidental. Many of the technologies
in use around the world and developed in Israel were originally military
technologies and were developed and improved by Unit veterans.” Having
both trained alumni of the organization and sophisticated eavesdropping
equipment developed by Unit 8200 in foreign countries would be an
enormous intelligence windfall, should Israel be able to harness it.
Retired Brigadier General Hanan Gefen, a former commander of Unit
8200, noted his former organization’s influence on Comverse, which
owns Verint, as well as other Israeli companies that dominate the U.S.
eavesdropping and surveillance market. “Take NICE, Comverse and
Check Point for example, three of the largest high-tech companies, which
were all directly influenced by 8200 technology,” said Gefen. “Check
Point was founded by Unit alumni. Comverse’s main product, the Logger,
is based on the Unit’s technology.”
Check Point, a large Israeli-based company that sells firewalls and
other Internet security software from an office in Redwood City, California,
was founded by Unit 8200 veteran Gil Shwed. Today the four years he spent in the Unit go virtually unmentioned in his official biography.
In 2006, the company attempted to acquire the firm Sourcefire, whose
intrusion-prevention technology is used to protect the computer assets of
both the Pentagon and NSA. Because of the potential for espionage, the
deal set off alarm bells at the NSA and FBI and it was eventually killed
by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the U.S., an oversight board.
Alan T. Sherman, a specialist in information assurance at the University
of Maryland, Baltimore County, noted the potential for “information warfare”
was likely. “It’s easy to hide malicious software code. Sometimes
it just takes a few lines of malicious code to subvert a system.” Nevertheless,
despite the fact that many of the NSA’s and the Pentagon’s sensitive
communications—like those of the rest of the country—travel across the
tapping equipment of Verint and Narus, their links to Israel seem to have
slipped below the radar. [Or people in this country are looking the other way D.C]
The large Israeli firm NICE, like Verint and Narus, is also a major
eavesdropper in the U.S., and like the other two, it keeps its government
and commercial client list very secret. A key member of the Wiretappers’
Ball, it was formed in 1986 by seven veterans of Unit 8200, according
to the company’s founder, Benny Levin. “We were seven people from
the Unit,” he said, “we all worked on a project for more than four years,
we knew each other very well. We had very good complementary skills.”
Like a page out of Orwell, all their high-tech bugging systems are called
“Nice.” Nice Perform, for example, “provides voice content analysis with
features such as: word spotting, emotion detection, talk pattern analysis,
and state-of-the-art visualization techniques.” Nice Universe “captures
voice, email, chat, screen activity, and essential call details.” Nice Log offers
“audio compression technology that performs continuous recordings
of up to thousands of analog and digital telephone lines and radio channels.”
And Nice VoIP “can use both packet sniffing and active recording
methods for recording VoIP sessions (both by telephone and Internet).”
In 2006, Yiar Cohen, a brigadier general who served as head of Unit
8200 from 2000 to 2005, became chairman of the board of the Israeli
company ECtel. Two years earlier, Verint had purchased that company’s
“government surveillance business” for $35 million. According to SEC
documents filed by ECtel, “Our surveillance solutions enabled governmental
agencies to perform real-time, comprehensive surveillance on
telecommunications networks. We sold this business to Verint Systems in March 2004.” Verint said of the purchase, “The acquisition will provide
Verint with additional communications interception capabilities for the
mass collection and analysis of voice and data communications . . . These
technologies will be integrated into Verint’s portfolio of communications
interception solutions and offered to Verint’s global customer base.”
That base, said Verint, included “new customers in new countries for
Verint in the Asia Pacific and Latin America regions.” Dan Bodner, president
and CEO of Verint, noted the long and close relationship with ECtel.
“We have been working with ECtel as a partner for a number of years and
our knowledge of their products and familiarity with their employees will
better enable us to integrate ECtel’s communications interception business
with Verint’s operations.”
ECtel’s Cohen, who was head of Unit 8200 at the time of the 9/11 attacks,
is also vice president of another Israeli telecom company, Elron.
He noted the importance of placing veteran electronic spies from Unit
8200 in Israeli high-tech firms. “I think there’s an axiomatic assumption
that Unit alumni are people who bring with them very high personal and
intellectual ability,” he said. “They have a common background, and they
know that 8200 has the privilege of sorting, choosing, and selecting the
best group so that you don’t have to invest so much in the selection yourself.
I myself, after I came to Elron, brought five additional alumni with
me.” The ultimate winner in such an arrangement, according to Cohen,
was Israel’s economy. “Although 8200 doesn’t directly enjoy the fruits,
the state of Israel does, and in my opinion that’s a complementary part of
the Unit’s task.”
Unit 8200’s revolving door with industry appears similar to that of the
NSA. As both electronic intelligence organizations grow ever more dependent
on the corporate world to conduct their eavesdropping, the line
between government and industrial espionage blurs. This presents great
opportunity for co-mingling personnel.
Similar to Verint, Narus was formed in November 1997 by five Israelis,
with much of its money coming from Walden Israel, an Israeli venture
capital company. At the time, most of the founders were working for the
Israeli company V.D.Onet, which specialized in live video broadcasts on
the Internet. Based in the Israeli city of Herzliya, the company also had
offices in the Silicon Valley town of Palo Alto, California, not far from
where Narus planted its flag in Mountain View.
Among the five was Stanislav Khirman, a husky, bearded Russian who earned degrees in math
at Ukrainian universities from 1980 to 1988. The next four years of his resume are blank, but in 1992 he began working for Elta Systems, Inc. A
division of Israel Aerospace Industries, Ltd., Elta specializes in developing
advanced eavesdropping systems for Israeli defense and intelligence
organizations. At Narus, Khirman became the chief technology officer.
Among the group of Israelis, Ori Cohen, a balding, dark-haired engineer
with a PhD in physics from Imperial College in London, became
president and chairman. He had spent a few years as CEO of IntelliCom
Ltd., a company of which there is no record, and then became vice president
of business and technology development at VDOnet with Khirman.
That is all the information he has ever released about himself and, like
Khirman, he makes no mention of his Israeli military service, if any. It
seems the man whose system invades the privacy of hundreds of millions
of Americans tries very hard to keep his own. Chief executive officer of
Narus is Greg Oslan, who previously worked for a company owned by
Haim Harel, an Israeli who spent much of his career specializing in electronic
intelligence systems at the large Israeli defense firm Tadiran.
Thus, virtually the entire American telecommunications system is
bugged by two Israeli-formed companies with possible ties to Israel’s
eavesdropping agency—with no oversight by Congress.
Also troubling are Verint’s extremely close ties to the FBI’s central
wiretapping office, known as the C.A.L.E.A Implementation Section (C.I.S).
The C.I.S had long fought for greater access to the telecommunications
switches—the same switches that Verint was tapping. The action by C.I.S
was strongly resisted by the telecom industry and privacy groups who
argued that the bureau was attempting to greatly exceed its legal mandate.
“The FBI is committing the kind of dirty tricks more characteristic of
scofflaws than cops,” said a commentary in the industry publication Wireless
Week. Taking aim at an FBI-crafted amendment to the wiretapping
law, the article warned, “The proposed amendment would have created
frightening police powers to track wireless users and prevented judicial
or regulatory review of FBI compliance methods for telecommunications
carriers.” Al Gidari, a lawyer representing the wireless industry, said the
FBI’s list of requirements amounted to “the Cadillac of wiretaps.” He
added, “Everything they could ever think of to gold plate and put on the
Cadillac was in that document.”
The head of the FBI’s liaison office with the telecom industry during
much of the period leading up to implementation was David Worthley.
What concerns many in the industry is that shortly after Worthley was
removed from his liaison job in June 1997, he turned up as president of
the Verint unit that sold its eavesdropping equipment and services to the
FBI, NSA, and other agencies. The company set up its offices in Chantilly,
Virginia—directly next door to the C.I.S and Worthley’s old office.
Thus, the company that secretly taps much of the country’s telecommunications
is now very closely tied to the agency constantly seeking greater
access to the switches. This concern over the cozy relationship between
the bureau and Verint greatly increased following disclosure of the Bush
administration’s warrant less eavesdropping operations. At the same time
that the tappers and the agents have grown uncomfortably close, the previous
checks and balances, such as the need for a F.I.S.A warrant, have
been eliminated.
But as earphone-clad FBI agents were listening for terrorists and
criminals through Verint’s taps, top executives from the company and its
parent, Comverse, were themselves engaging in an orgy of theft, bribery,
money laundering, and other crimes.
For Kobi Alexander, chairman of Verint and CEO of Comverse, summers
meant vacation and vacation often meant visiting relatives in Israel.
Thus on June 28, 2006, as fierce rainstorms swept up and down the
mid-Atlantic region, he, his wife, and their young daughter headed for
Kennedy International Airport and a flight on El Al Airlines to sunny Tel
Aviv. But unlike other trips back to his homeland, this time he sent ahead
some extra cash: $57 million. Also unlike other vacations, this time it was
going to be a one-way trip.
For Alexander, the storm clouds had been hovering overhead for
months. On the other side of Manhattan, the Justice Department was in
the final stages of preparing a thirty-two-count indictment charging him
with masterminding a scheme to backdate millions of Comverse stock
options. It was a crime, prosecutors say, that allowed Alexander to realize
$138 million in profits—profits stolen from the pockets of the company’s
shareholders. The indictment also named as co-conspirators Comverse
chief financial officer David Kreinberg, forty-one, and general counsel
William Sorin, fifty-six. In addition, the trio of executives was accused
of creating a secret slush fund to distribute options to favored employees, options that could be exercised overnight for millions in profits. For Alexander,
the charges had the potential of putting him away in prison for
as long as twenty-five years, and leveling fines and penalties of more than
$150 million.
To many who knew him, Alexander was the poster child for arrogance
and greed. “The one thing about Kobi is that he did have a sense of entitlement,”
said Stephen R. Kowarsky, a former colleague. “Most people
are a little bit shy or self-effacing about asking for something, but not
Kobi. It was easy for him to say, ‘I want that. I deserve that.’”
In 2001, Alexander was the fourth most overpaid CEO in the U.S. telecom
industry, making six times his deserved salary, in the view of the
Bloomberg News columnist Graef Crystal. That year his compensation
totaled $102.5 million, including $93.1 million in exercised stock options.
The year before, he cashed in an additional $80 million worth of
options. Plus, until such actions were outlawed by the Sarbanes-Oxley
Act of 2002, he had packed the board with his father, Zvi Alexander,
and his sister, Shaula Alexander Yemini—who conveniently sat on the
board’s remuneration and stock option committee. Yet despite their enormous
wealth, around their luxury West 57th Street high-rise, where they
owned several condominiums and counted Goldie Hawn, Paul Allen, and
Al Pacino as neighbors, Kobi and his wife, Hana, were known as notoriously
bad tippers. “They’d give us like $10 or $20 or $30 as a tip for the
holidays,” scowled one worker at the building.
Alexander’s sense of entitlement extended to escaping punishment.
Knowing he was likely to be indicted, he resigned his positions at Verint
and Comverse on May 1, 2006. Then, according to the Justice Department,
Alexander offered a Comverse colleague $2 million to take the
blame and serve the prison time on his behalf. When that wasn’t enough,
he upped the offer to $5 million, and then simply “told the individual he
can name his own price.” But no offer was high enough, so Alexander
went to Plan B, fleeing to Israel with his family and transferring $57 million
from his bank in New York to an account in Israel.
Alexander believed Israel had become a safe haven for wealthy crooks
with ethnic or religious ties to the country, including Marc Rich, the business
associate of his father. Also taking refuge from the law in Israel
was Leonid Nevzlin, the former deputy CEO of O.A.O Yukos Oil Company,
who was facing tax evasion and murder conspiracy charges in Russia.
Another was Pincus Green[L], like Rich a commodities trader charged
with tax evasion in the U.S. Still another was Eddie Antar,[R] the founder
of the “Crazy Eddie” chain of electronics stores, who was charged with
fraud and racketeering by the SEC. He was located in Israel following
an intensive two-year international manhunt, but he asserted his Israeli
citizenship and was allowed to stay. “He was Jewish, and the Israelis
didn’t want to extradite someone who was Jewish,” said Jayne Blumberg,
a former federal prosecutor in Newark who investigated and prosecuted
the case. Antar, however, eventually decided against fighting extradition
procedures and was returned to the U.S.
While Israel would be safe for a time, there were no guarantees it
would remain that way; the country did have an extradition treaty with
the U.S., and in both countries Alexander was a very high-profile figure.
Thus, soon after his arrival he began intensively researching nations without
an extradition agreement with the American government and, after a
process of elimination, settled on the southwest African country of Namibia.
Remote, sparsely populated, made up mostly of the bleak Kalahari
Desert, it was also seemingly immune from the long arm of the FBI. On
July 18, ten days before he was scheduled to return to New York from his
vacation, he flew to the Namibian capital of Windhoek. A century earlier,
the city was the seat of power in the German colony of South West Africa,
and the country’s influence was still very apparent in the architecture as
well as the food. In addition to local dishes, most menus listed venison
and sauerkraut as well as locally brewed beer.
It was the middle of the African winter and the days were mild when
Alexander stepped off the plane at Windhoek Hosea Kutako International
Airport. After making some initial contacts, he flew back to Israel and
continued pushing his attorneys to negotiate a deal with federal prosecutors
to avoid criminal charges. But in a July 21 conversation, the prosecutors
would only agree to meet Alexander at JFK Airport and not arrest
him at that time. Alexander agreed and provided evidence that he was
ticketed on an El Al flight arriving in New York on July 28. But on July
27, he and his family instead flew from Tel Aviv to Frankfurt, Germany,
where they transferred to Lufthansa for a nonstop flight to Windhoek.
After showing their Israeli passports, the Alexanders took a taxi to the
posh Hotel Thule in Eros, a nearby suburb. Located high on a hill above
Windhoek, the hotel offered vistas of the city below and the low-slung mountains in the distance. Flanked by stately palm trees, with guinea
fowl and rock rabbits crawling about, it must have seemed a world away
from their 57th Street apartment. The hotel literature boasted that Thule
was “a mythical place . . . at the frontier of reality—the edge of the world.”
Alexander no doubt hoped so, but he must also have liked the part of the
brochure that said the hotel was “an exclusive getaway.”
Under the sheltering canopy of blue sky in Namibia, the staff of the
Hotel Thule had no idea there was an international manhunt for their new
guest. Nor did they think it suspicious that he shunned credit cards and
paid cash in advance for two adjoining ground-floor rooms at $143 each
a night. “We knew them as the Family Jacobs, that’s how the booking
agency gave it to us,” said manager Wolfgang Balzer. “Alexander always
looked very busy, and he insisted that the news channel on the satellite
decoder always work. He was very anxious about that . . . I thought being
from Israel, he was worried about Lebanon and all that.”
Alexander bought a $107,000 Land Cruiser and began looking for a
place to live. At the end of August he settled on Windhoek Country Club
Estate, a gated community of fifty-seven block-style town houses that back
up to the Windhoek Golf Course on the outskirts of the city. The family
moved into number 19, a modern, five-thousand-square-foot, two-story
house he purchased for $543,000. In the shadow of the Auas Mountains,
the tan-colored house had a satellite dish perched on the roof and a basketball
hoop hanging from the garage. Next door to the complex was the
Desert Jewel Casino, which featured American roulette, stud poker, blackjack,
and 290 slot machines. But perhaps the most important feature of the
house was its proximity to Eros Airport, a private airstrip only about two
hundred meters away, in the event he needed another quick escape.
Alexander knew it was only a matter of time before he was discovered
and the United States began putting pressure on the Namibian government
to toss him out. He therefore began investing large sums of money with
powerful officials connected to the government, and making high-profile
contributions to local civic projects. For Kobi Alexander, everyone had a
price, a lesson he learned from his father’s years of backroom payoffs to
petty African officials for oil rights. After transferring about $16 million
to a bank account in Namibia, he launched into a frenzy of investments
and goodwill gestures, from developing $1.5 million in low-cost housing
to $20,000 in yearly high school scholarships.
Alexander’s principal business partners included Brigadier Mathias
Sciweda[L] of the Namibia Defence Force, who headed up the army’s commercial
arm and was known to be close to Namibia’s powerful former
president, Sam Nujoma[R]. The two bought a number of properties, including
one encompassing thirteen acres at Walvis Bay. In 2005, Sciweda’s
name had come up in a Namibian financial scandal involving an investment
by Namibia’s Social Security Commission of $4.3 million in a failed
asset-management firm. Sciweda was named by the head of the firm to be
among the shareholders. But he later testified that he never received any
money from the firm.
On the other side of the world, when Alexander failed to show up at JFK Airport on July 28, the Justice Department immediately filed a criminal complaint charging him, Kreinberg, and Sorin with dozens of counts of fraud and other crimes. But instead of making the document public, they placed it under seal; thinking no charges had yet been filed, he might return voluntarily. Alexander, however, had no intention of ever returning to America and on July 31 attempted to transfer another $12 million out of his U.S. bank. By then, however, his remaining $50 million had been frozen by the prosecutors.
By August 9, the Justice Department concluded that Alexander was on the run and unsealed the indictment. At a press conference in Washington that day, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty made the dramatic announcement. “Three former executives of Comverse Technology,” he said, “were charged today for their roles in orchestrating a long-running scheme to manipulate the grant of millions of Comverse stock options to themselves and to employees. Former chief executive officer Jacob ‘Kobi’ Alexander, former chief financial officer David Kreinberg, and former general counsel William F. Sorin allegedly orchestrated the scheme by fraudulently backdating the options and operating a secret stock options slush fund. An arrest warrant has been issued for Alexander.” Acting assistant FBI director James “Chip” Burrus then added, “The alleged scheme of these defendants in backdating options victimized both Comverse shareholders and the American people.”
The FBI slapped Alexander’s face on its Most Wanted list and Interpol sent out a global “Red Notice” asking all cooperating countries to arrest him if he showed up at their border. Both Kreinberg and Sorin were arraigned in Brooklyn federal court within hours of the press conference and later pled guilty and faced prison sentences and millions of dollars in fines and penalties. Comverse and Verint were dumped from the Nasdaq Stock Market.
For a while, Alexander seemed safe. But as the millions began flowing into his Windhoek bank account, the transfers raised the suspicions of the country’s bank regulatory agency and they notified Interpol. A few days later, on August 18, Interpol asked Namibian authorities to investigate whether Alexander was in the country. Within hours they reported back that he was and, at the request of the American government, Namibia’s extradition laws were ordered changed to include the United States. The addition was approved by Namibia’s president, Hifikepunye Pohamba, on August 31, but because it would take about a month for the modification to go into effect, it was decided not to alert Alexander. Two days earlier he had been granted a two-year work permit.
On September 27, the new extradition law went into effect and the news was reported in the local paper. Before Alexander could escape again, police arrested him at his home as he was having lunch with his wife and daughter. “He got very nervous when we handcuffed him,” Namibia’s chief inspector, William Lloyd, recalled. “He could see there was something serious coming at him.” Placed in a patrol car, he was taken to Windhoek Central Prison, a desolate, overcrowded fortress encircled by razor wire and high-voltage electrified fences. There he was tossed into H-Section, where the average cell was packed with as many as thirty inmates. It was a long, hard fall for the man who had bugged America— and the world.
It was also a troubling insight into just how vulnerable America’s voice and data communications systems have become. Unknown to the public, an entire national telecom network was channeled through a powerful foreign-made bug controlled by a corrupt foreign-based company with close links to a foreign electronic spy agency. As of 2008, the bug was still there and the only thing that had changed was a reshuffling of the company’s top management.
Kobi Alexander’s stay in prison was short; after six days he was released on $1.4 million in bail—the largest in the history of the country—and he has remained free ever since. As he keeps pumping tens of millions of dollars into Namibia’s weak economy his extradition keeps getting pushed back further and further. “It looks like he’s trying to influence the politics of Namibia to keep him there,” said Patrick Dahlstrom, an attorney representing the financially harmed shareholders. Nonsense, replied Alexander’s attorney, Richard Metcalfe, who saw no correlation between his client’s newfound sense of generosity and his desire to stay in Namibia and out of an American prison. “I think it’s typical of Kobi Alexander,” he said. “I think it’s part of that great Jewish ethos of generosity, of displaying generosity toward other people when you’re doing well and when things go well with you. And I think that’s part of the man and part of his psyche to be generous to people.”[Now that is funny,smfh DC]
Verint’s long list of customers also includes Vietnam, a place where the government makes no bones about eavesdropping on domestic communications, and putting in jail anyone caught opposing its policies. All Internet service providers (I.S.P's) there are state owned and they are required to provide technical assistance and work space to public security agents to allow them to monitor Internet activities. The government also requires Internet agents, such as cyber cafe's, to register the personal information of their customers, store records of Internet sites visited by customers for thirty days, and cooperate with public security officials.
In July 2006, about the time Verint was taking Vietnam on as a client, the Ministry of Post and Telematics instructed all I.S.P's to install in their Internet kiosks new control software designed to record information on users and their Internet behavior and send the information to the I.S.P's servers to be stored for a year. The software also contained an identification system that allows I.S.P's to identify the user and what the user does during an Internet session. To use Internet kiosks, customers must provide personal details to acquire a user name and password—both issued and controlled by the I.S.P. Customers then can use the issued user name and password to browse the Internet. In addition, at least some home Internet subscribers had all Internet usage monitored by the newly installed software and hardware system.
The new system worked well. On March 11, 2007, police raided a cyber cafe and arrested an Internet user in Hanoi while he was taking part in a discussion forum on democracy. By the end of the year, his status was still unknown. Then, using the new equipment, the government installed firewalls to block websites that it deemed politically or culturally inappropriate, including sites operated by exile groups abroad. The government occasionally restricted access to the Radio Free Asia and Voice of America websites, as well as sites operated by overseas dissident groups. Among those affected were local newspapers that occasionally wrote stories based on R.F.A broadcasts. Finally, the government required owners of domestic websites, including those operated by foreign entities, to register their sites with the government and submit their website content to the government for approval.
Among those who must now watch his words is Le Quoc Quan, a political dissident who spends much of his time looking for safe places to talk about his opposition to the regime in power. He is far from paranoid; in 2007, Quan, a lawyer, was carted away to prison for one hundred days on suspicion of passing information to the CIA.
So pervasive is the new commercially available Internet censorship technology that dissidents are now arrested in Internet cafe's, and state security agents show up at homes to seize computers. Around the same time Quan was arrested, the country’s supreme court sentenced two other cyber-dissidents to jail for terms of three and four years for transmitting over the Internet “anti-government propaganda.” To avoid the cyber-goons, Quan and a number of other protesters turned to VoIP. By communicating by phone over the Internet, their data packets become much harder to capture and their conversations are therefore more secure.
Among the most popular VoIP systems is Skype, which is a revolution in telecommunications. Not only are Skype calls cheap and easy to make, they are also virtually unbuggable—and the best way to defeat Narus, Verint, and even the NSA. The company, acquired by eBay, Inc., provides free voice calls and instant messaging between users. There is a fee to talk to nonmembers. But the most unique feature is its security, which is achieved by end-to-end encryption for all calls to other members. Such technology makes it possible to fight back against the proliferating eavesdropping factories. Skype and other VoIP calls have become life preservers for dissidents such as Quan in repressive countries around the world. The technology gives them the freedom necessary to plan demonstrations, enlist supporters, and organize meetings. “It’s great. Amazing,” says Quan. “Talking by phone is absolutely not safe in Vietnam. This way we can communicate more securely.” Another option to further evade the authorities is to say parts of the message over the VoIP connection and then simultaneously write other parts on the Internet. Another advantage lies simply in the numbers—in 2007, there were about 17.9 million Internet users in Vietnam, nearly 21 percent of the country. “We can connect to a whole new generation,” says Nguyen Thanh Giang, a seventy-one-year-old scholar and dissident who avoids the police patrols constantly watching his house by communicating over Skype. “More and more people are joining up.” The need for such protection is clear. In 2006, five dissident writers were jailed for planning to publish the newsletter Tu Do Dan Chu (“Freedom and Democracy”). About the same time another cyber-dissident, Truong Quoc Huy, twenty-five, who had spent nearly nine months in jail with his brother for chatting on a pro-democracy Internet forum, was rearrested. The list of similar arrests is long, and Quan and Giang’s days of dissent may, like that of Huy and his brother, be over. Verint’s deal placed in the hands of the Vietnamese government the technology to block all VoIP calls from the Internet. This would force the dissidents to either use the monitored phone lines or the tapped Internet, both subject to Verint’s intrusive technology.
The initial agreement between Verint and Vietnam’s security chief in the Ministry of the Interior took place in 2002 and included two P-G.S.M stations, portable mobile phone listening devices, at $250,000 each. Since then, the company’s involvement with the Communist government has grown substantially. Another company involved in the sale was Silver Bullet, a European company, and two Israeli companies acted as intermediaries. A few years later, the press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders discovered the deal. For years the group had focused closely on Vietnam’s harsh treatment of journalists and dissidents and they quickly issued a strong protest. “We are appalled to learn that our phone calls with Vietnamese cyber-dissidents have been monitored with equipment provided by European and U.S. companies,” the organization said. “Coming a year after it emerged that Yahoo! cooperates with the Chinese police, this new case reinforces our conviction that telecommunications companies must be forced to respect certain rules of ethical conduct. In particular, they should be banned from selling surveillance equipment to repressive governments.”
Although Verint refused to confirm the deal with the Vietnamese government, in 2002 it had issued a press release saying the company had been “selected to provide law enforcement communications interception solutions to a new customer in Asia Pacific,” for “more than $1.5 million” but chose not to mention the name of the country. The system sounded very similar to the widespread surveillance network it installed in Mexico. “Verint Systems,” said the July 8, 2002, release, “a leading provider of analytic solutions for communications interception, digital video security and surveillance, and enterprise business intelligence . . . will provide a communications interception solution, including the ‘front-end’ interception system installed within the communications network of the service provider and the ‘back-end’ monitoring center used by multiple law enforcement agencies to collect and analyze intercepted communications from the specific network . . . Verint’s software, which is used by over 800 organizations in over 50 countries worldwide, generates actionable intelligence through the collection, retention and analysis of voice, fax, video, email, Internet and data transmissions from multiple communications networks.”
In 2007, First Consulting Group (F.C.G) Vietnam listed Verint as one of their key clients in Vietnam. “Verint is a leading global provider of Actionable Intelligence Software and Services,” it said, adding that the company had been “engaged with F.C.G Vietnam for almost 4 years.” As a sign of how much the company had grown in the country, F.C.G Vietnam noted that Verint had “started with 5 resources [personnel]; current team is over 120 resources.”
Like Verint, Narus is branching out, looking to install its powerful tapping equipment deep within the world’s telecommunications infrastructure. And also like its competitor, Narus has focused much of its attention on repressive countries, including China, with its forty million Internet users. “Narus’ carrier-class I.P platform is the first and only foreign I.P management and security system ever certified by us,” said Wang Haisheng, director of China’s Internet police, the Information Technology Security Certification Center. “Narus’ approach to IP data capture, analysis and management provides telecom carriers with a total network view to protect their network infrastructure. After months of rigorous testing and evaluation, Narus’ solution proved to meet our stringent IT security criteria.” The Chinese government implanted Narus in all its telecommunication organizations including China Telecom, China Netcom, China Mobile, and China Unicom. The services included “traffic analysis” and “interception.”
The Narus spy equipment has had a devastating effect. According to a report by the State Department, “The authorities reportedly began to employ more sophisticated technology enabling the selective blocking of specific content rather than entire Web sites. Such technology was also used to block e-mails containing sensitive content . . . New restrictions aimed at increasing government control over the Internet included stricter Web site registration requirements, enhanced official control of online content, and an expanded definition of illegal online content. The country’s Internet control system reportedly employed tens of thousands of persons. The government consistently blocked access to sites it deemed controversial, such as sites discussing Taiwan and Tibetan independence, underground religious and spiritual organizations, democracy activists, and the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. The government also at times blocked access to selected sites operated by major foreign news outlets, health organizations, and educational institutions.” [State department should be worried about what OUR government is doing in THIS country,like they can preach to China,or any other country for that matter D.C]
In Shanghai, like in Vietnam, dissidents once used VoIP to avoid government-owned
Shanghai Telecom’s 6.2 million landlines—until the
company installed the Narus software to prevent such calls and track them
down. Now the dissidents face the same fate as their Vietnamese counterparts.
Elsewhere in China in 2006, the dozens of Internet arrests included
the former Fuzhou Daily journalist and Internet essayist Li Changqing,
who was sentenced to three years in prison for “spreading alarmist information.”
His Internet articles supported jailed corruption whistle blower
Huang Jingao. A few months later, the Internet essayist Yang Tongyan
was sentenced to twelve years in prison for posting on overseas websites
articles calling for the release of Chinese dissidents. About the same time,the Internet author Guo Qizhen was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment
on the charge of “inciting subversion of state power.” By 2008, fifty one
cyber-dissidents and thirty-five journalists were sitting in Chinese
prisons, according to Reporters Without Borders.
Narus has also quietly sold similar equipment to many of the most repressive governments of the Middle East, from Pakistan to Egypt to Saudi Arabia to Libya, some known to torture opponents. In 2005, Narus announced “a multimillion-dollar agreement with Giza Systems of Egypt, licensing Narus’ comprehensive portfolio of IP management and security products in the Middle East region. Giza Systems, a world-class systems provider of telecommunications solutions in the Middle East, delivers IP management and security solutions in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, and Libya using the Narus system. Narus and Giza Systems formalized this exclusive relationship after working together for more than two years providing Voice over IP (VoIP) detection, mediation, and protection to the largest IP carriers in the Middle East. Telecom Egypt and Saudi Telecom are already benefiting from Narus’ carrier-class applications for analysis, security, monitoring and mediation of IP traffic in combination with Giza Systems’ technical and commercial capabilities.”
According to James Mullins, Narus’s vice president of sales for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, “Collaborating with a recognized leader in deploying I.P services gives Narus a clear advantage in meeting the needs of Middle Eastern carriers . . . Teaming up with Giza Systems to target the Middle East region enables Narus to extend its worldwide leadership position in unified I.P Management and Security. It ensures that customers get both the solutions and support for their IP networks that they require.”
Shortly after installing the Narus system, the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information issued a decree asserting the government’s right to block, suspend, or shut down any website deemed to threaten national security. Then on October 30, 2006, Reporters Without Borders published a list of thirteen countries it labeled as “enemies of the Internet,” a list that included Vietnam and also Egypt due to the recent imprisonment of pro-democracy bloggers. On January 27, 2006, the Egyptian government reportedly had blocked the website Save Egypt Front (saveegyptfront.org). And on May 7, security forces had arrested prominent blogger Alaa Seif Al-Islam (www.manalaa.net) and detained him at Tora Prison until June 22 without charges. Many other bloggers were also arrested and at least one was tortured, according to a U.S. State Department report.
Not only is Narus selling interception and VoIP-blocking software to these countries, it is also selling an extremely intrusive package known as Forensics. Designed for one of the largest telecommunications networks, Tier-One, the system enables the owner to do “Web page reconstruction, playback of VoIP traffic and e-mail reconstruction.” An associated program called Narus Directed Analysis “provides a flexible, targeting component designed to surgically capture traffic around a specific event [such as a demonstration], anomalous behavior or specific computer. Among the possible targeting criteria are client identity, server identity, protocol, network link.” These two pieces of software, Narus says, “are currently deployed in Tier-1 Carrier-Class networks around the world including Asia and EMEA [Europe, the Middle East and Africa].”
Not to be outdone, Verint offers its “VANTAGE Mass Interception Solutions” for any country interested in total control of its citizens. “Verint Communications Interception Solutions extract intelligence from virtually any type of network,” its sales literature says. “VANTAGE is a mass interception system that intercepts, filters and analyzes voice and data for intelligence purposes, with sophisticated probing technology for collecting maximum communications, Verint’s real-time filtering mechanisms to extract the most important information, and stored data analysis for generating intelligence from data collected over time. Access sources range from passive trunk monitoring at the operator’s facility to microwave and satellite interception.”
The Verint sales brochure goes on to say:
VANTAGE features include:
• Mass interception of communications related to specific areas of interest
• Passive monitoring of virtually any type of network
• Sophisticated filtering for high-throughput networks and to track known targets and network events in real time
• Processing engines to organize mass amounts of collected unstructured data into a format that enables rule-based retrieval and interactive analysis
• Interactive analysis tools, including free text search, visual link analysis, location tracking, and reporting
• Built-in support for various intelligence methodologies
Once the phone calls and Internet activity are captured, Verint gives its customers the tools to deeply mine the information for whomever or whatever it is targeting. “DEEPVIEW,” says Verint, is a “packet data collection system with the comprehensive functionality to penetrate deep into communications.” It also contains a “powerful decoding engine that addresses such services as VoIP, email, webmail, chat, web surfing, instant messaging, and more.”
For the companies, marketing their mass interception systems to dictatorships and authoritarian governments to enhance their police states and to jail opponents is just business. “Once our customers buy our product, it’s relatively opaque to us,” said Steve Bannerman, vice president of marketing at Narus.
But while the physicists and engineers at Narus had discovered the key to secretly intercepting massive amounts of communications, what they were lacking was an efficient method of picking out the targeted names, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers and packaging the data for their customers in the U.S. and overseas. To help them solve that problem, the company turned to a part-time vintner attempting to grow grapes on a scruffy patch of tired Nebraska soil. For a company founded by Israelis and used to the fast-paced life of Silicon Valley, Bennet, Nebraska, population 685, was a long way away—both in miles and culture.
As the lawsuit dragged on for five years, Murman created a new company called Pen-Link that developed software to analyze phone call patterns from wiretaps. The company developed computer programs to find links between the numbers—who’s being called by whom, and who they are calling. “We would give them an automated way to load telephone records and provide an analysis tool for that information,” he said.
When not acting as an amateur vintner, Murman runs his bugging and link-analysis firm from its small headquarters at 5936 VanDervoort Drive in Lincoln, Nebraska, about fifteen miles from Bennet. A regular at the Wiretappers’ Ball, he says Pen-Link has about a hundred large wiretap installations and thousands of customers, including seven thousand who are still using the company’s first product. The latest products are the Lincoln System, used in phone taps, and the Predator, for Internet eavesdropping. Among his customers are the CIA and a number of other lettered government agencies, as well as eight foreign countries, mostly in Latin America, and he is actively marketing to the Middle East. “Every government in the world does interception of communications, some lawfully, some not,” Murman candidly admits. “We realized that our growth shouldn’t just be in the United States, but everywhere.”
As for most participants in the Wiretappers’ Ball, the Bush administration’s warrant less eavesdropping program has meant boom times for Pen-Link. In 2003, the company’s sales were $6.9 million; by 2006 they had grown 121 percent to $15.2 million. Nevertheless, Murman prefers to keep a low profile. “Nobody knows much about who we are,” he says. “We like being private and under the radar in Lincoln, Nebraska.”[I will throw a dot out there D.C]
https://www.hebrewsurnames.com/MURMAN
By the summer of 2006, however, Narus was looking for new ways to mine the data it was collecting and came knocking at Murman’s door with a collaboration deal. Murman accepted and on June 13, Narus announced “a strategic agreement with Pen-Link, Ltd. to market NarusInsight Intercept Suite software in conjunction with Pen-Link’s LINCOLN® 2 intercept collection and reporting solution.” The announcement said marrying Narus’s powerful intercept capability with Pen-Link’s sophisticated analysis software “combined best-of-breed technologies.” Narus also boasted of its capability to do “deep packet inspection”—the analysis not just of the address information but of the entire content of traffic. “NarusInsight is unique in its ability to simultaneously provide deep packet inspection from layer 3 to layer 7 and complete correlation across every link and element on the network.”
As the NSA obtained access to virtually all domestic and international communications through the Narus and Verint bugs, analysts next turned their focus to mining that information for intelligence.
What both the NSA and the FBI were most interested in was “link analysis”—building ever-expanding lists of names emanating outward from their original target, like circles in a pond from a dropped stone. If John was the target, who were the people John called the most, what time were the calls, what was their frequency and their duration? Then each of these people—John’s “community of interest” in NSA lingo—would be targeted, and on and on like an endless chain letter.
The FBI began flooding the telecoms with emergency “exigent circumstances” letters asking for calling records on long lists of targets. “Due to exigent circumstances it is requested that call detail records for the attached list of telephone numbers be provided,” said the letters. “Additionally, please provide a community of interest for the telephone numbers in the attached list.” The operation was conducted from Room 4315, the Communications Analysis Unit, at FBI headquarters in Washington.
Verizon alone received over 239,000 “requests and demands for customer
information” from federal and state officials between January 2005
and September 2007. But because its database was designed simply for
billing purposes, the company was not able to provide the “community
of interest” data requested. According to Randal S. Milch, Verizon’s general
counsel, the company also received requests “containing ‘boilerplate’
language directing us, for instance, ‘to identify a “calling circle” for the
foregoing telephone numbers based on a two generation community of
interest; provide related subscriber information.’ ” In a letter to members
of Congress looking into the requests, Milch said, “Because Verizon does
not maintain such ‘calling circle’ records, we have not provided this information
in response to these requests; we have not analyzed the legal
justification for any such requests, been offered indemnification for any
such requests, or sought our customers’ consent to respond to . . . any
such requests.”
One solution to the problem was for the NSA to secretly obtain massive amounts of current and past billing information from the telecoms and then use their own personnel and supercomputers to identify the calling circles around their targets. Because of an FCC rule requiring the telecoms to keep these records for seven years, there was a vast supply. And because the NSA was principally interested only in international links, the companies they approached were AT&T, MCI WorldCom (which later became part of Verizon), and possibly Sprint. AT&T and MCI apparently agreed.
“The president’s program uses information collected from phone companies,” said Senator Kit Bond, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “The phone companies keep their records. They have a record. And it shows what telephone number called what other telephone number.” Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell also indicated that the warrant less eavesdropping program was only one program of many highly secret NSA programs approved by Bush following the attacks on 9/11. “This is the only aspect of the NSA activities that can be discussed publicly, because it is the only aspect of those various activities whose existence has been officially acknowledged,” he said.
For the NSA, the most valuable source of this information was AT&T. “The AT&T network, on a busy workday, gets around 300 million calls,” said Rick Greer of AT&T Labs in 2001. Two years later that figure had grown to 400 million calls and billions of e-mail messages a day. To store over a trillion records a year, Greer spent much of the last two decades building Daytona, AT&T’s monster in-house database management system. Housed at the AT&T Labs Florham Park complex, the same place that controlled the company’s PacketScope cable-tapping operation, the data warehouse contains an astronomical number of phone records, including over 312 terabytes of information and 2.8 trillion records. By comparison, the 28 million books in the U.S. Library of Congress contain a total of approximately 20 terabytes of text. Among the databases managed by Daytona was the company’s Security Call Analysis and Monitoring Platform (SCAMP), WorldNet IP data warehouse, and Hawkeye, a gargantuan database containing all of AT&T’s phone call records.
While AT&T uses Hawkeye to store years of compressed, inactive records, the company keeps the most recent two years’ worth of phone data on SCAMP, which was designed to be accessed frequently. Once a call has been completed, its details—the phone number called, time of call, and duration of call—are instantly entered into the SCAMP database. Another system, possibly Hawkeye, contains the name and address data. The NSA obtained direct access to both systems and may have downloaded massive amounts of the data in order to conduct their own “calling circle” analysis. “An analyst can query the system for all calls made to a country from a specific area code during a specific month and get an answer within a minute,” said an AT&T specialist. Thus, the NSA could check all calls made to Afghanistan from New York City during September 2001, and have an answer almost instantly. Once the “calling circles” were created, the NSA began its eavesdropping on the American names and phone numbers inside—one, two, or three steps removed from the original target.
Because of the enormous volume of call records to analyze, NSA is now outsourcing much of the work to private contractors, a fact that raises serious additional questions about oversight and concerns over who is given access to the most private information about Americans. For example, SAIC recently placed an advertisement for a “geo metadata/global network analyst.” The requirements include: “Must be able to manipulate GEO data, follow and reacquire targets, operationalize analysis, manipulate call records and conduct call chaining with the purpose of identifying targets.” “Call chaining” is the term used for creating the “calling circles” and the SAIC office placing the ad was in Columbia, Maryland, near the NSA.
By 2003, both the NSA and SCAMP were drowning in records. That year, according to AT&T, SCAMP became “the world’s largest publicly known database by far as verified by being awarded two Grand Prizes in the 2003 Winter [Corp.] Top 10 Very Large Database contest. Data management for SCAMP is provided by Daytona.” Although AT&T may have won the top prize for the largest “publicly known database,” the NSA would have likely won the award for the largest database known or unknown—likely in the mega-petabytes (a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes). “It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person about the NSA’s phone-record program, adding that it was the agency’s goal “to create a database of every call ever made” within the U.S. “Having lots of data gives you lots of power,” warned one AT&T official. Even those involved in the NSA program are becoming “uncomfortable with the mountain of data they have now begun to accumulate,” according to a lawyer for one.
This calling-circle program was one of the key reasons that the agency began bypassing the F.I.S.A court and launched its warrant less eavesdropping program. Unable to show probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion—simply a link to a name or a phone number—the NSA was on an expansive fishing expedition, an activity strictly prohibited by both F.I.S.A and the Fourth Amendment. People became NSA targets simply because they happened to call a target, subjecting all of their international communications to warrant less tapping, whether they were simply a neighbor or a friend. The agency termed the activity “hot pursuit” and argued that it provided “early warning.” “The president determined that it was necessary following September 11 to create an early-warning detection system,” said Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella. “FISA could not have provided the speed and agility required for the early-warning detection system.”
While the NSA focused on the international communications of those within the calling circles, it also passed on the U.S. phone numbers to the FBI as unsolicited leads so they could begin a domestic investigation, including tapping their domestic phone calls. But soon after the program started, bureau agents began getting swamped with thousands of these blind names and numbers a month, virtually all of which, according to some of those involved in the program, led nowhere—to a babysitter or the local pizza joint. The result was frequent complaints to the bureau’s NSA liaison that the unfiltered and unanalyzed data was flooding them and keeping them from pursuing more productive work. “We’d chase a number, find it’s a schoolteacher with no indication they’ve ever been involved in international terrorism—case closed,” said one former FBI official knowledgeable about the program. “After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration.”
Thus, of the approximately five thousand NSA warrant less taps conducted between September 2001 and December 2005, fewer than ten Americans a year drew enough suspicion to move to the next level. That involved obtaining a F.I.S.A order to begin targeting their domestic communications. While it could be argued that obtaining those ten was worth the effort, others would argue that at least that number may have been lost by flooding the FBI with so much useless information, thus preventing them from pursuing more promising leads.
Another problem was the secretive way in which the agency passed the data to the FBI. At first, because the agents were not cleared for the program, they were only given the names and phone numbers without any details as to where they came from or why they might be useful. The NSA simply told them that it was “information whose source we can’t share, but it indicates that this person has been communicating with a suspected al-Qaeda operative.”
The program raised serious concerns about issues of privacy. At one point FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III questioned senior administration officials about “whether the program had a proper legal foundation.” But the Justice Department, which at about the same time was finding little problem with torture, told Mueller the department’s legal memorandums supported it. Nevertheless, Mueller’s concerns were well founded. Among the places that received data from the NSA’s program was the Defense Intelligence Agency, which, on occasion, used the material to conduct physical surveillance of people and vehicles within the U.S.
By 2008, the idea of communications privacy in the United States had literally become a joke. A group calling itself the Billboard Liberation Front began putting up large billboards bearing the AT&T logo with ad copy such as: “AT&T works in more places, like NSA HEADQUARTERS.” The group said it was offering its help to the phone company for free to “promote and celebrate the innovative collaboration of these two global communications giants.” According to the group’s minister of propaganda, Blank DeCoverly, “These two titans of telecom have a long and intimate relationship dating back to the age of the telegraph. In these dark days of terrorism, that should be a comfort to every law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide.”
Rather than hide its partnership with the NSA, the group suggested that AT&T should place it at the center of a new ad campaign and even offered a suggested tagline: “Modern life is so hectic—who has time to cc the feds on every message? It’s a great example of how we anticipate our customers’ needs and act on them.”
But for many, allowing the NSA to plunder everyone’s private communications is not a laughing matter, especially if the agency begins tapping into such companies as Google. In addition to having millions of e-mail customers through their Gmail service, the company maintains records of trillions of Internet searches by hundreds of millions of Americans. For many, every time they have a question they turn to Google, giving the company—and thus the NSA—an enormous insight into everyone’s thinking.
According to a former Google executive who left in 2004, the thought that the NSA’s data miners could begin ordering them to install a secret pipeline to the agency has many in the company worried. “During my time at Google,” he said, “we actually had committee meetings to plan strategy for what to do if the NSA came to us with a demand—and I left kind of in the middle of this. We started making process changes to the way we handled information to make sure that information that the NSA wanted wouldn’t be there. The right thing to do would be to erase everything, but the founders of Google are such information freaks they couldn’t do that. So they wanted to find ways to make it so that the NSA couldn’t benefit from [the stored data] but Google could. And by the time I left, they hadn’t located that boundary . . . They were really worried about what would happen if the NSA learned what could be done with information that Google had. And they figured that they only had a couple of years before somebody in the government figured it out.”
next Book 4
Discovery
On the other side of the world, when Alexander failed to show up at JFK Airport on July 28, the Justice Department immediately filed a criminal complaint charging him, Kreinberg, and Sorin with dozens of counts of fraud and other crimes. But instead of making the document public, they placed it under seal; thinking no charges had yet been filed, he might return voluntarily. Alexander, however, had no intention of ever returning to America and on July 31 attempted to transfer another $12 million out of his U.S. bank. By then, however, his remaining $50 million had been frozen by the prosecutors.
By August 9, the Justice Department concluded that Alexander was on the run and unsealed the indictment. At a press conference in Washington that day, Deputy Attorney General Paul J. McNulty made the dramatic announcement. “Three former executives of Comverse Technology,” he said, “were charged today for their roles in orchestrating a long-running scheme to manipulate the grant of millions of Comverse stock options to themselves and to employees. Former chief executive officer Jacob ‘Kobi’ Alexander, former chief financial officer David Kreinberg, and former general counsel William F. Sorin allegedly orchestrated the scheme by fraudulently backdating the options and operating a secret stock options slush fund. An arrest warrant has been issued for Alexander.” Acting assistant FBI director James “Chip” Burrus then added, “The alleged scheme of these defendants in backdating options victimized both Comverse shareholders and the American people.”
The FBI slapped Alexander’s face on its Most Wanted list and Interpol sent out a global “Red Notice” asking all cooperating countries to arrest him if he showed up at their border. Both Kreinberg and Sorin were arraigned in Brooklyn federal court within hours of the press conference and later pled guilty and faced prison sentences and millions of dollars in fines and penalties. Comverse and Verint were dumped from the Nasdaq Stock Market.
For a while, Alexander seemed safe. But as the millions began flowing into his Windhoek bank account, the transfers raised the suspicions of the country’s bank regulatory agency and they notified Interpol. A few days later, on August 18, Interpol asked Namibian authorities to investigate whether Alexander was in the country. Within hours they reported back that he was and, at the request of the American government, Namibia’s extradition laws were ordered changed to include the United States. The addition was approved by Namibia’s president, Hifikepunye Pohamba, on August 31, but because it would take about a month for the modification to go into effect, it was decided not to alert Alexander. Two days earlier he had been granted a two-year work permit.
On September 27, the new extradition law went into effect and the news was reported in the local paper. Before Alexander could escape again, police arrested him at his home as he was having lunch with his wife and daughter. “He got very nervous when we handcuffed him,” Namibia’s chief inspector, William Lloyd, recalled. “He could see there was something serious coming at him.” Placed in a patrol car, he was taken to Windhoek Central Prison, a desolate, overcrowded fortress encircled by razor wire and high-voltage electrified fences. There he was tossed into H-Section, where the average cell was packed with as many as thirty inmates. It was a long, hard fall for the man who had bugged America— and the world.
It was also a troubling insight into just how vulnerable America’s voice and data communications systems have become. Unknown to the public, an entire national telecom network was channeled through a powerful foreign-made bug controlled by a corrupt foreign-based company with close links to a foreign electronic spy agency. As of 2008, the bug was still there and the only thing that had changed was a reshuffling of the company’s top management.
Kobi Alexander’s stay in prison was short; after six days he was released on $1.4 million in bail—the largest in the history of the country—and he has remained free ever since. As he keeps pumping tens of millions of dollars into Namibia’s weak economy his extradition keeps getting pushed back further and further. “It looks like he’s trying to influence the politics of Namibia to keep him there,” said Patrick Dahlstrom, an attorney representing the financially harmed shareholders. Nonsense, replied Alexander’s attorney, Richard Metcalfe, who saw no correlation between his client’s newfound sense of generosity and his desire to stay in Namibia and out of an American prison. “I think it’s typical of Kobi Alexander,” he said. “I think it’s part of that great Jewish ethos of generosity, of displaying generosity toward other people when you’re doing well and when things go well with you. And I think that’s part of the man and part of his psyche to be generous to people.”[Now that is funny,smfh DC]
Technotyranny
Not only have Narus and Verint tapped virtually the entire American
telecom system, between the two firms they have also wired much
of the planet for sound—democracies as well as dictatorships, it doesn’t
seem to make any difference. Never before in history have so few people
wiretapped so many. From China to America and from Europe to
Southeast Asia and Australia, countries use Verint and Narus equipment
to eavesdrop on—and in many cases repress—their citizens. Verint, for
example, was the company that won the contract to build a secret nationwide
eavesdropping system for the government of Mexico. Verint’s long list of customers also includes Vietnam, a place where the government makes no bones about eavesdropping on domestic communications, and putting in jail anyone caught opposing its policies. All Internet service providers (I.S.P's) there are state owned and they are required to provide technical assistance and work space to public security agents to allow them to monitor Internet activities. The government also requires Internet agents, such as cyber cafe's, to register the personal information of their customers, store records of Internet sites visited by customers for thirty days, and cooperate with public security officials.
In July 2006, about the time Verint was taking Vietnam on as a client, the Ministry of Post and Telematics instructed all I.S.P's to install in their Internet kiosks new control software designed to record information on users and their Internet behavior and send the information to the I.S.P's servers to be stored for a year. The software also contained an identification system that allows I.S.P's to identify the user and what the user does during an Internet session. To use Internet kiosks, customers must provide personal details to acquire a user name and password—both issued and controlled by the I.S.P. Customers then can use the issued user name and password to browse the Internet. In addition, at least some home Internet subscribers had all Internet usage monitored by the newly installed software and hardware system.
The new system worked well. On March 11, 2007, police raided a cyber cafe and arrested an Internet user in Hanoi while he was taking part in a discussion forum on democracy. By the end of the year, his status was still unknown. Then, using the new equipment, the government installed firewalls to block websites that it deemed politically or culturally inappropriate, including sites operated by exile groups abroad. The government occasionally restricted access to the Radio Free Asia and Voice of America websites, as well as sites operated by overseas dissident groups. Among those affected were local newspapers that occasionally wrote stories based on R.F.A broadcasts. Finally, the government required owners of domestic websites, including those operated by foreign entities, to register their sites with the government and submit their website content to the government for approval.
Among those who must now watch his words is Le Quoc Quan, a political dissident who spends much of his time looking for safe places to talk about his opposition to the regime in power. He is far from paranoid; in 2007, Quan, a lawyer, was carted away to prison for one hundred days on suspicion of passing information to the CIA.
So pervasive is the new commercially available Internet censorship technology that dissidents are now arrested in Internet cafe's, and state security agents show up at homes to seize computers. Around the same time Quan was arrested, the country’s supreme court sentenced two other cyber-dissidents to jail for terms of three and four years for transmitting over the Internet “anti-government propaganda.” To avoid the cyber-goons, Quan and a number of other protesters turned to VoIP. By communicating by phone over the Internet, their data packets become much harder to capture and their conversations are therefore more secure.
Among the most popular VoIP systems is Skype, which is a revolution in telecommunications. Not only are Skype calls cheap and easy to make, they are also virtually unbuggable—and the best way to defeat Narus, Verint, and even the NSA. The company, acquired by eBay, Inc., provides free voice calls and instant messaging between users. There is a fee to talk to nonmembers. But the most unique feature is its security, which is achieved by end-to-end encryption for all calls to other members. Such technology makes it possible to fight back against the proliferating eavesdropping factories. Skype and other VoIP calls have become life preservers for dissidents such as Quan in repressive countries around the world. The technology gives them the freedom necessary to plan demonstrations, enlist supporters, and organize meetings. “It’s great. Amazing,” says Quan. “Talking by phone is absolutely not safe in Vietnam. This way we can communicate more securely.” Another option to further evade the authorities is to say parts of the message over the VoIP connection and then simultaneously write other parts on the Internet. Another advantage lies simply in the numbers—in 2007, there were about 17.9 million Internet users in Vietnam, nearly 21 percent of the country. “We can connect to a whole new generation,” says Nguyen Thanh Giang, a seventy-one-year-old scholar and dissident who avoids the police patrols constantly watching his house by communicating over Skype. “More and more people are joining up.” The need for such protection is clear. In 2006, five dissident writers were jailed for planning to publish the newsletter Tu Do Dan Chu (“Freedom and Democracy”). About the same time another cyber-dissident, Truong Quoc Huy, twenty-five, who had spent nearly nine months in jail with his brother for chatting on a pro-democracy Internet forum, was rearrested. The list of similar arrests is long, and Quan and Giang’s days of dissent may, like that of Huy and his brother, be over. Verint’s deal placed in the hands of the Vietnamese government the technology to block all VoIP calls from the Internet. This would force the dissidents to either use the monitored phone lines or the tapped Internet, both subject to Verint’s intrusive technology.
The initial agreement between Verint and Vietnam’s security chief in the Ministry of the Interior took place in 2002 and included two P-G.S.M stations, portable mobile phone listening devices, at $250,000 each. Since then, the company’s involvement with the Communist government has grown substantially. Another company involved in the sale was Silver Bullet, a European company, and two Israeli companies acted as intermediaries. A few years later, the press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders discovered the deal. For years the group had focused closely on Vietnam’s harsh treatment of journalists and dissidents and they quickly issued a strong protest. “We are appalled to learn that our phone calls with Vietnamese cyber-dissidents have been monitored with equipment provided by European and U.S. companies,” the organization said. “Coming a year after it emerged that Yahoo! cooperates with the Chinese police, this new case reinforces our conviction that telecommunications companies must be forced to respect certain rules of ethical conduct. In particular, they should be banned from selling surveillance equipment to repressive governments.”
Although Verint refused to confirm the deal with the Vietnamese government, in 2002 it had issued a press release saying the company had been “selected to provide law enforcement communications interception solutions to a new customer in Asia Pacific,” for “more than $1.5 million” but chose not to mention the name of the country. The system sounded very similar to the widespread surveillance network it installed in Mexico. “Verint Systems,” said the July 8, 2002, release, “a leading provider of analytic solutions for communications interception, digital video security and surveillance, and enterprise business intelligence . . . will provide a communications interception solution, including the ‘front-end’ interception system installed within the communications network of the service provider and the ‘back-end’ monitoring center used by multiple law enforcement agencies to collect and analyze intercepted communications from the specific network . . . Verint’s software, which is used by over 800 organizations in over 50 countries worldwide, generates actionable intelligence through the collection, retention and analysis of voice, fax, video, email, Internet and data transmissions from multiple communications networks.”
In 2007, First Consulting Group (F.C.G) Vietnam listed Verint as one of their key clients in Vietnam. “Verint is a leading global provider of Actionable Intelligence Software and Services,” it said, adding that the company had been “engaged with F.C.G Vietnam for almost 4 years.” As a sign of how much the company had grown in the country, F.C.G Vietnam noted that Verint had “started with 5 resources [personnel]; current team is over 120 resources.”
Like Verint, Narus is branching out, looking to install its powerful tapping equipment deep within the world’s telecommunications infrastructure. And also like its competitor, Narus has focused much of its attention on repressive countries, including China, with its forty million Internet users. “Narus’ carrier-class I.P platform is the first and only foreign I.P management and security system ever certified by us,” said Wang Haisheng, director of China’s Internet police, the Information Technology Security Certification Center. “Narus’ approach to IP data capture, analysis and management provides telecom carriers with a total network view to protect their network infrastructure. After months of rigorous testing and evaluation, Narus’ solution proved to meet our stringent IT security criteria.” The Chinese government implanted Narus in all its telecommunication organizations including China Telecom, China Netcom, China Mobile, and China Unicom. The services included “traffic analysis” and “interception.”
The Narus spy equipment has had a devastating effect. According to a report by the State Department, “The authorities reportedly began to employ more sophisticated technology enabling the selective blocking of specific content rather than entire Web sites. Such technology was also used to block e-mails containing sensitive content . . . New restrictions aimed at increasing government control over the Internet included stricter Web site registration requirements, enhanced official control of online content, and an expanded definition of illegal online content. The country’s Internet control system reportedly employed tens of thousands of persons. The government consistently blocked access to sites it deemed controversial, such as sites discussing Taiwan and Tibetan independence, underground religious and spiritual organizations, democracy activists, and the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. The government also at times blocked access to selected sites operated by major foreign news outlets, health organizations, and educational institutions.” [State department should be worried about what OUR government is doing in THIS country,like they can preach to China,or any other country for that matter D.C]
Narus has also quietly sold similar equipment to many of the most repressive governments of the Middle East, from Pakistan to Egypt to Saudi Arabia to Libya, some known to torture opponents. In 2005, Narus announced “a multimillion-dollar agreement with Giza Systems of Egypt, licensing Narus’ comprehensive portfolio of IP management and security products in the Middle East region. Giza Systems, a world-class systems provider of telecommunications solutions in the Middle East, delivers IP management and security solutions in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, and Libya using the Narus system. Narus and Giza Systems formalized this exclusive relationship after working together for more than two years providing Voice over IP (VoIP) detection, mediation, and protection to the largest IP carriers in the Middle East. Telecom Egypt and Saudi Telecom are already benefiting from Narus’ carrier-class applications for analysis, security, monitoring and mediation of IP traffic in combination with Giza Systems’ technical and commercial capabilities.”
According to James Mullins, Narus’s vice president of sales for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, “Collaborating with a recognized leader in deploying I.P services gives Narus a clear advantage in meeting the needs of Middle Eastern carriers . . . Teaming up with Giza Systems to target the Middle East region enables Narus to extend its worldwide leadership position in unified I.P Management and Security. It ensures that customers get both the solutions and support for their IP networks that they require.”
Shortly after installing the Narus system, the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information issued a decree asserting the government’s right to block, suspend, or shut down any website deemed to threaten national security. Then on October 30, 2006, Reporters Without Borders published a list of thirteen countries it labeled as “enemies of the Internet,” a list that included Vietnam and also Egypt due to the recent imprisonment of pro-democracy bloggers. On January 27, 2006, the Egyptian government reportedly had blocked the website Save Egypt Front (saveegyptfront.org). And on May 7, security forces had arrested prominent blogger Alaa Seif Al-Islam (www.manalaa.net) and detained him at Tora Prison until June 22 without charges. Many other bloggers were also arrested and at least one was tortured, according to a U.S. State Department report.
Not only is Narus selling interception and VoIP-blocking software to these countries, it is also selling an extremely intrusive package known as Forensics. Designed for one of the largest telecommunications networks, Tier-One, the system enables the owner to do “Web page reconstruction, playback of VoIP traffic and e-mail reconstruction.” An associated program called Narus Directed Analysis “provides a flexible, targeting component designed to surgically capture traffic around a specific event [such as a demonstration], anomalous behavior or specific computer. Among the possible targeting criteria are client identity, server identity, protocol, network link.” These two pieces of software, Narus says, “are currently deployed in Tier-1 Carrier-Class networks around the world including Asia and EMEA [Europe, the Middle East and Africa].”
Not to be outdone, Verint offers its “VANTAGE Mass Interception Solutions” for any country interested in total control of its citizens. “Verint Communications Interception Solutions extract intelligence from virtually any type of network,” its sales literature says. “VANTAGE is a mass interception system that intercepts, filters and analyzes voice and data for intelligence purposes, with sophisticated probing technology for collecting maximum communications, Verint’s real-time filtering mechanisms to extract the most important information, and stored data analysis for generating intelligence from data collected over time. Access sources range from passive trunk monitoring at the operator’s facility to microwave and satellite interception.”
The Verint sales brochure goes on to say:
VANTAGE features include:
• Mass interception of communications related to specific areas of interest
• Passive monitoring of virtually any type of network
• Sophisticated filtering for high-throughput networks and to track known targets and network events in real time
• Processing engines to organize mass amounts of collected unstructured data into a format that enables rule-based retrieval and interactive analysis
• Interactive analysis tools, including free text search, visual link analysis, location tracking, and reporting
• Built-in support for various intelligence methodologies
Once the phone calls and Internet activity are captured, Verint gives its customers the tools to deeply mine the information for whomever or whatever it is targeting. “DEEPVIEW,” says Verint, is a “packet data collection system with the comprehensive functionality to penetrate deep into communications.” It also contains a “powerful decoding engine that addresses such services as VoIP, email, webmail, chat, web surfing, instant messaging, and more.”
For the companies, marketing their mass interception systems to dictatorships and authoritarian governments to enhance their police states and to jail opponents is just business. “Once our customers buy our product, it’s relatively opaque to us,” said Steve Bannerman, vice president of marketing at Narus.
But while the physicists and engineers at Narus had discovered the key to secretly intercepting massive amounts of communications, what they were lacking was an efficient method of picking out the targeted names, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers and packaging the data for their customers in the U.S. and overseas. To help them solve that problem, the company turned to a part-time vintner attempting to grow grapes on a scruffy patch of tired Nebraska soil. For a company founded by Israelis and used to the fast-paced life of Silicon Valley, Bennet, Nebraska, population 685, was a long way away—both in miles and culture.
Miners
In the summer of 2006, Mike Murman’s big concern was getting a permit
from the Otoe County commissioners for a building to house a grape crushing
machine for the winery he had been trying to start for six years.
“I call it Glacial Till Vineyards,” he said. Murman also wanted permission
for an open-lagoon wastewater treatment system on the premises. A native
Nebraskan from Hastings, Murman, forty-nine, graduated from the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1979 with a degree in business and
marketing and began working for Selection Research, Inc., a Nebraska based
market research and personnel testing firm, and a few years later
he decided to start up his own company, Measurement Systems Corp. But
because its work was similar to that of Selection Research, the company
sued Murman for his alleged use of trade secrets. As the lawsuit dragged on for five years, Murman created a new company called Pen-Link that developed software to analyze phone call patterns from wiretaps. The company developed computer programs to find links between the numbers—who’s being called by whom, and who they are calling. “We would give them an automated way to load telephone records and provide an analysis tool for that information,” he said.
When not acting as an amateur vintner, Murman runs his bugging and link-analysis firm from its small headquarters at 5936 VanDervoort Drive in Lincoln, Nebraska, about fifteen miles from Bennet. A regular at the Wiretappers’ Ball, he says Pen-Link has about a hundred large wiretap installations and thousands of customers, including seven thousand who are still using the company’s first product. The latest products are the Lincoln System, used in phone taps, and the Predator, for Internet eavesdropping. Among his customers are the CIA and a number of other lettered government agencies, as well as eight foreign countries, mostly in Latin America, and he is actively marketing to the Middle East. “Every government in the world does interception of communications, some lawfully, some not,” Murman candidly admits. “We realized that our growth shouldn’t just be in the United States, but everywhere.”
As for most participants in the Wiretappers’ Ball, the Bush administration’s warrant less eavesdropping program has meant boom times for Pen-Link. In 2003, the company’s sales were $6.9 million; by 2006 they had grown 121 percent to $15.2 million. Nevertheless, Murman prefers to keep a low profile. “Nobody knows much about who we are,” he says. “We like being private and under the radar in Lincoln, Nebraska.”[I will throw a dot out there D.C]
https://www.hebrewsurnames.com/MURMAN
By the summer of 2006, however, Narus was looking for new ways to mine the data it was collecting and came knocking at Murman’s door with a collaboration deal. Murman accepted and on June 13, Narus announced “a strategic agreement with Pen-Link, Ltd. to market NarusInsight Intercept Suite software in conjunction with Pen-Link’s LINCOLN® 2 intercept collection and reporting solution.” The announcement said marrying Narus’s powerful intercept capability with Pen-Link’s sophisticated analysis software “combined best-of-breed technologies.” Narus also boasted of its capability to do “deep packet inspection”—the analysis not just of the address information but of the entire content of traffic. “NarusInsight is unique in its ability to simultaneously provide deep packet inspection from layer 3 to layer 7 and complete correlation across every link and element on the network.”
As the NSA obtained access to virtually all domestic and international communications through the Narus and Verint bugs, analysts next turned their focus to mining that information for intelligence.
What both the NSA and the FBI were most interested in was “link analysis”—building ever-expanding lists of names emanating outward from their original target, like circles in a pond from a dropped stone. If John was the target, who were the people John called the most, what time were the calls, what was their frequency and their duration? Then each of these people—John’s “community of interest” in NSA lingo—would be targeted, and on and on like an endless chain letter.
The FBI began flooding the telecoms with emergency “exigent circumstances” letters asking for calling records on long lists of targets. “Due to exigent circumstances it is requested that call detail records for the attached list of telephone numbers be provided,” said the letters. “Additionally, please provide a community of interest for the telephone numbers in the attached list.” The operation was conducted from Room 4315, the Communications Analysis Unit, at FBI headquarters in Washington.
One solution to the problem was for the NSA to secretly obtain massive amounts of current and past billing information from the telecoms and then use their own personnel and supercomputers to identify the calling circles around their targets. Because of an FCC rule requiring the telecoms to keep these records for seven years, there was a vast supply. And because the NSA was principally interested only in international links, the companies they approached were AT&T, MCI WorldCom (which later became part of Verizon), and possibly Sprint. AT&T and MCI apparently agreed.
“The president’s program uses information collected from phone companies,” said Senator Kit Bond, the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. “The phone companies keep their records. They have a record. And it shows what telephone number called what other telephone number.” Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell also indicated that the warrant less eavesdropping program was only one program of many highly secret NSA programs approved by Bush following the attacks on 9/11. “This is the only aspect of the NSA activities that can be discussed publicly, because it is the only aspect of those various activities whose existence has been officially acknowledged,” he said.
For the NSA, the most valuable source of this information was AT&T. “The AT&T network, on a busy workday, gets around 300 million calls,” said Rick Greer of AT&T Labs in 2001. Two years later that figure had grown to 400 million calls and billions of e-mail messages a day. To store over a trillion records a year, Greer spent much of the last two decades building Daytona, AT&T’s monster in-house database management system. Housed at the AT&T Labs Florham Park complex, the same place that controlled the company’s PacketScope cable-tapping operation, the data warehouse contains an astronomical number of phone records, including over 312 terabytes of information and 2.8 trillion records. By comparison, the 28 million books in the U.S. Library of Congress contain a total of approximately 20 terabytes of text. Among the databases managed by Daytona was the company’s Security Call Analysis and Monitoring Platform (SCAMP), WorldNet IP data warehouse, and Hawkeye, a gargantuan database containing all of AT&T’s phone call records.
While AT&T uses Hawkeye to store years of compressed, inactive records, the company keeps the most recent two years’ worth of phone data on SCAMP, which was designed to be accessed frequently. Once a call has been completed, its details—the phone number called, time of call, and duration of call—are instantly entered into the SCAMP database. Another system, possibly Hawkeye, contains the name and address data. The NSA obtained direct access to both systems and may have downloaded massive amounts of the data in order to conduct their own “calling circle” analysis. “An analyst can query the system for all calls made to a country from a specific area code during a specific month and get an answer within a minute,” said an AT&T specialist. Thus, the NSA could check all calls made to Afghanistan from New York City during September 2001, and have an answer almost instantly. Once the “calling circles” were created, the NSA began its eavesdropping on the American names and phone numbers inside—one, two, or three steps removed from the original target.
Because of the enormous volume of call records to analyze, NSA is now outsourcing much of the work to private contractors, a fact that raises serious additional questions about oversight and concerns over who is given access to the most private information about Americans. For example, SAIC recently placed an advertisement for a “geo metadata/global network analyst.” The requirements include: “Must be able to manipulate GEO data, follow and reacquire targets, operationalize analysis, manipulate call records and conduct call chaining with the purpose of identifying targets.” “Call chaining” is the term used for creating the “calling circles” and the SAIC office placing the ad was in Columbia, Maryland, near the NSA.
By 2003, both the NSA and SCAMP were drowning in records. That year, according to AT&T, SCAMP became “the world’s largest publicly known database by far as verified by being awarded two Grand Prizes in the 2003 Winter [Corp.] Top 10 Very Large Database contest. Data management for SCAMP is provided by Daytona.” Although AT&T may have won the top prize for the largest “publicly known database,” the NSA would have likely won the award for the largest database known or unknown—likely in the mega-petabytes (a petabyte is 1,000 terabytes). “It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” said one person about the NSA’s phone-record program, adding that it was the agency’s goal “to create a database of every call ever made” within the U.S. “Having lots of data gives you lots of power,” warned one AT&T official. Even those involved in the NSA program are becoming “uncomfortable with the mountain of data they have now begun to accumulate,” according to a lawyer for one.
This calling-circle program was one of the key reasons that the agency began bypassing the F.I.S.A court and launched its warrant less eavesdropping program. Unable to show probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion—simply a link to a name or a phone number—the NSA was on an expansive fishing expedition, an activity strictly prohibited by both F.I.S.A and the Fourth Amendment. People became NSA targets simply because they happened to call a target, subjecting all of their international communications to warrant less tapping, whether they were simply a neighbor or a friend. The agency termed the activity “hot pursuit” and argued that it provided “early warning.” “The president determined that it was necessary following September 11 to create an early-warning detection system,” said Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella. “FISA could not have provided the speed and agility required for the early-warning detection system.”
While the NSA focused on the international communications of those within the calling circles, it also passed on the U.S. phone numbers to the FBI as unsolicited leads so they could begin a domestic investigation, including tapping their domestic phone calls. But soon after the program started, bureau agents began getting swamped with thousands of these blind names and numbers a month, virtually all of which, according to some of those involved in the program, led nowhere—to a babysitter or the local pizza joint. The result was frequent complaints to the bureau’s NSA liaison that the unfiltered and unanalyzed data was flooding them and keeping them from pursuing more productive work. “We’d chase a number, find it’s a schoolteacher with no indication they’ve ever been involved in international terrorism—case closed,” said one former FBI official knowledgeable about the program. “After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration.”
Thus, of the approximately five thousand NSA warrant less taps conducted between September 2001 and December 2005, fewer than ten Americans a year drew enough suspicion to move to the next level. That involved obtaining a F.I.S.A order to begin targeting their domestic communications. While it could be argued that obtaining those ten was worth the effort, others would argue that at least that number may have been lost by flooding the FBI with so much useless information, thus preventing them from pursuing more promising leads.
Another problem was the secretive way in which the agency passed the data to the FBI. At first, because the agents were not cleared for the program, they were only given the names and phone numbers without any details as to where they came from or why they might be useful. The NSA simply told them that it was “information whose source we can’t share, but it indicates that this person has been communicating with a suspected al-Qaeda operative.”
The program raised serious concerns about issues of privacy. At one point FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III questioned senior administration officials about “whether the program had a proper legal foundation.” But the Justice Department, which at about the same time was finding little problem with torture, told Mueller the department’s legal memorandums supported it. Nevertheless, Mueller’s concerns were well founded. Among the places that received data from the NSA’s program was the Defense Intelligence Agency, which, on occasion, used the material to conduct physical surveillance of people and vehicles within the U.S.
By 2008, the idea of communications privacy in the United States had literally become a joke. A group calling itself the Billboard Liberation Front began putting up large billboards bearing the AT&T logo with ad copy such as: “AT&T works in more places, like NSA HEADQUARTERS.” The group said it was offering its help to the phone company for free to “promote and celebrate the innovative collaboration of these two global communications giants.” According to the group’s minister of propaganda, Blank DeCoverly, “These two titans of telecom have a long and intimate relationship dating back to the age of the telegraph. In these dark days of terrorism, that should be a comfort to every law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide.”
Rather than hide its partnership with the NSA, the group suggested that AT&T should place it at the center of a new ad campaign and even offered a suggested tagline: “Modern life is so hectic—who has time to cc the feds on every message? It’s a great example of how we anticipate our customers’ needs and act on them.”
But for many, allowing the NSA to plunder everyone’s private communications is not a laughing matter, especially if the agency begins tapping into such companies as Google. In addition to having millions of e-mail customers through their Gmail service, the company maintains records of trillions of Internet searches by hundreds of millions of Americans. For many, every time they have a question they turn to Google, giving the company—and thus the NSA—an enormous insight into everyone’s thinking.
According to a former Google executive who left in 2004, the thought that the NSA’s data miners could begin ordering them to install a secret pipeline to the agency has many in the company worried. “During my time at Google,” he said, “we actually had committee meetings to plan strategy for what to do if the NSA came to us with a demand—and I left kind of in the middle of this. We started making process changes to the way we handled information to make sure that information that the NSA wanted wouldn’t be there. The right thing to do would be to erase everything, but the founders of Google are such information freaks they couldn’t do that. So they wanted to find ways to make it so that the NSA couldn’t benefit from [the stored data] but Google could. And by the time I left, they hadn’t located that boundary . . . They were really worried about what would happen if the NSA learned what could be done with information that Google had. And they figured that they only had a couple of years before somebody in the government figured it out.”
next Book 4
Discovery
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