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The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act and provided to Wired News by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.
It's a "comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems," says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert.
Those are just the first three grafs of today's comprehensive Wired News story about the surprising reach of the FBI's surveillance architecture.
University of Pennsylvania professor Matt Blaze, known in part for figuring out a hack to evade wiretapping systems using a phone feature known as the C-tone, took time in his busy travel schedule to help me understand the documents. He's already got a post up of his own about the heavily redacted documents:
The DCS documents themselves, which comprise more than a thousand pages, have been published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. They came to light only because of the efforts of Marcia Hofmann, who successfully sued the FBI to win their release. More DCS documents will come every month until the FBI releases all of them. For its part, the FBI kindly responded to my questions about the documents and kept me from making unwarranted assumptions or relying on outdated information. Cox Communications lawyer Randy Cadenhead was also key to the story. Among the things that didn't make it into the final piece is that Cox is the only major telecom company to publicly publish its forms and fees for wiretaps. That documentation, which doesn't reveal any national secrets, should be on every telecom's website, in interests of transparency. Unfortunately, none of the largest wireless carriers do so, nor they, with the notable exception of AT&T, responded to requests for comments on the story.
Cadenhead also noted that Cox Communications did not participate in, or have any knowledge of, other wiretapping programs that have recently been in the news (read: warrantless wiretapping).
Finally, the documents and the story have plenty left to be explored, and I'm hoping that Wired News and THREAT LEVEL readers will help out. Already one reader, Fat Cobra, points out that the FBI denials of outside penetration of the wiretapping system may have missed the work of Mossad, Israel's intelligence service.
I'll update this post with readers' finds and with posts from others, such as Columbia University professor Steven Bellovin, whose evaluation of the documents made the story possible.
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