lambda 5.03 / Novembre 24, 1999

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 THE PSN FIASCO:
INTEL'S PRIVACY POLICY FACES EU LAW

An exclusive document from the French Data Commision CNIL (july 1999) explains what was to be done with Intel's Processor Serial Number regarding European laws on privacy (see lambda 5.02). The chip giant changed its worldwide policy during these negocations. For those who can read French. And for those who would want to translate the stuff.

> The CNIL report (French)
> Bigbrotherinside by Junkbusters

B2 92 UNDER PRESSURE

-AGAIN

 

ANEM said on November 2 that Yugoslav Academic Network blocks access to Radio B292 web site (Xs4all servers)

www.freeb92.net

 

Contents 5.03

+ CISCO'S WIRETAP-FRIENDLY ROUTERS

+ EASY TO FIND, DIFFICULT TO JAM: a special report

+ FRENCHELON: Helios Connection

- S H O R T C U T S (China, UK, GILC ALERT)

 

VoiP wiretaps

Wiretap-friendly routers
By Cisco Systems

 

While a court challenge involving the US Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act ("CALEA") was launched against the FCC by EPIC and ACLU councels, the lambda has found evidence that Cisco Systems has already made its broadband routers "wiretap-ready" for VoIP as well as data.

EPIC and ACLU assert that the FCC ruling exceeds the requirements of CALEA and frustrates the privacy interests protected by federal statutes and the Fourth Amendment. According to EPIC's General Counsel, David L. Sobel, "The FBI is seeking surveillance capabilities that far exceed the powers law enforcement has had in the past and is entitled to under the law. It is disappointing that the FCC resolved this issue in favor of police powers and against privacy."

Sobel said that the appeals court challenge "raises fundamental privacy issues affecting the American public. This case will likely define the privacy standards for the Nation's telecommunication networks, including the cellular systems and the Internet."

The CALEA could be compared to a French 1991 Act covering "interceptions de sécurités" ordered either by the government or by the judiciary (e-mail as well as voice, cellular and fixed). In that law network operators are already obliged to build their hardware to allow law enforcement agencies' wiretaps under control of an "independant" Commission.

Recently, the IETF, members were under pressure from US authorities to modify IPv6 standards to comply with CALEA. "It'd be like having the Christian Coalition debating a protocol for third-trimester abortions", one member reportedly said.

But as Bob Barr, a US Congressman, said in an open letter to the IETF Chairman on Oct. 25, "it is questionable whether Internet telephony could ever be appropriately included under the Act's mandates. Of course, this fact will not put an end to demands by law enforcement and regulators that Internet service providers and telecommunications companies make their jobs easier by wiretapping the Internet for them."

Cisco Systems builds broadband routers used widely for the public backbone of the Internet. A technical note published on Sept. 27 1999 give details about a "new feature" called "Basic Wiretap Facility". (2 updates have appeared since then, the last on Nov. 11.)

 

Release Notes for Cisco uBR7200 Series for Cisco IOS Release 12.0 T.
 
September 7, 1999
 
... Basic Wiretap Support. ... The wiretap facility is based on the MAC address of the
cable modem so it can be used for either data or digitized voice connections.
 
This feature is controlled by the new interface command, cable intercept, which requires a MAC address, an IP address, and a UDP port number as its parameters. When activated, the Cisco uBR7200 series router examines each packet for the desired MAC address; when a matching MAC address is found (for either the origination or destination endpoint), a copy of the packet is encapsulated into a UDP packet which is then sent to the server at the specified IP address and port. ..."

***

Related article about the IPv6's wiretapp policy

EASY TO SPOT, DIFFICULT TO JAM

SIGN OF THE TIMES

Time for change, Echelon?

 

The Echelon snooping network is on the agenda to be severely scrutinized. The Washington Post reported on Nov 13 that Rep. Bob Barr "added a provision in the fiscal 2000 intelligence budget that requires the NSA to report within 60 days on its legal standards for intercepting communications in the United States and abroad." The provision was approved by "House and Senate conferees" on Nov. 5, the paper said.

On Tuesday, November 16, the American Civil Liberties Union launched a web site designed to shed light on the THING:
www.echelonwatch.org

 

Meanwhile elsewhere, people talked a lot more about Echelon since Oct. 21, and the 'Jam Echelon Day' campaign.

International members of the 'hacktivism' mailing list advised people to jam the network putting subversive keywords in their email, an action firstly designed to protest the secrecy behing ComInt capabilities of what is known as Echelon.

They succeeded to gain a lot of public attention and it helped privacy rights as a whole.

The lambda talked on the phone with British MEP Glyn Ford a few days before. "Everything that can bring the public more awareness about Echelon is welcomed," said Ford, a member of the STOA panel who published two reports in '98 and '99 for the European Parliament. "I'm not against using modern technology to avoid crimes, but this interception network doesn't make any difference, honests citizens or criminals, with no democratic control."

But Ford recognized that keyword-jaming scams won't do nothing to the NSA, even with its supposed several billionn wiretaps per day capabilities worldwide.

"This initiative is a welcome step towards improving and extending public awareness of the illegal interception of international civil communications by the US NSA and other intelligence organisations," Duncan Campbell, author of the last EP report, Interception Capabilities 2000, said in a "prepared statement" the same day, 21/10/99. "By raising awareness of such unlawful activities, however, Jam Echelon Day will undoubtedly contribute to its goal, by bringing awareness to an ever wider constituency. ...

  • "The repeated transmission of strings of hypothetical key words will certainly come to the attention of NSA and its sister organisations, but is unlikely to affect or degrade their spying capabilities. They are skilled in information warfare; their tools are designed to separate signals from noise. Advertised attacks such as the "jam Echelon" string can be recognised as noise and, thus, not processed.

    • Wayne Madsen, EPIC (Washington DC):

  • "I think it will cause a lot of laughter up at NSA, to tell the truth. If they seriously think they're going to bring the computers at the NSA to a grinding halt, they're going to be seriously disappointed." (AP)

    • Simon Davies, Privacy International (London):

  • "I don't think we'll ever know [about the effectiveness of JED]. I would guess maybe it will be 10 years before we understand the ramifications of any civil disobedience campaign." (AP)

    •  

    SO HOW DOES IT WORK?

    (Or supposed to be)

    FromDuncan Campbell (1999)
    Interception Capabilities 2000

    As Campbell's report says (Interception Capabilities 2000, par. 81), "The use of strong cryptography is slowly impinging on Comint agencies' capabilities. This difficulty for Comint agencies has been offset by covert and overt activities which have subverted the effectiveness of cryptographic systems supplied from and/or used in Europe."

    Other evidence of keyworks methods' effectiveness found by Campbell in his report are described there:

     

  • 81. Fax messages and computer data (from modems) are given priority in processing because of the ease with which they are understood and analysed. The main method of filtering and analysing non-verbal traffic, the Dictionary computers, utilise traditional information retrieval techniques, including keywords. Fast special purpose chips enable vast quantities of data to be processed in this way. The newest technique is "topic spotting". The processing of telephone calls is mainly limited to identifying call-related information, and traffic analysis. Effective voice "wordspotting" systems do not exist are not in use, despite reports to the contrary. But "voiceprint" type speaker identification systems have been in use since at least 1995. ...
  • Technical annexe
  • 27. According to former NSA Director William Studeman, "information management will be the single most important problem for the (US) Intelligence Community" in the future.(85) Explaining this point in 1992, he described the type of filtering involved in systems like ECHELON:

    "One [unidentified] intelligence collection system alone can generate a million inputs per half hour; filters throw away all but 6500 inputs; only 1,000 inputs meet forwarding criteria; 10 inputs are normally selected by analysts and only one report Is produced. These are routine statistics for a number of intelligence collection and analysis systems which collect technical intelligence." ...

    •  

    Details about trafic analysis and efficient keyword search engines systems (par. n°19 to 27 in the report), Speech recognition software (par. 28 to 34).

  • STOA Reports:
    Omega Foundation, 1997
    D. Campbell, 1999

    •  

     

    NSA PATENT TELLS THE TRUTH ?

    Part of it

     

    Three NSA engineer patented a new technology (USPO n°5937422) about a topic-based information retrieval system. Some reports Nov. 15 said it is designed to track telephone calls. But it does not deal specifically with voice. It has more to do with semantics analysis with multilingual features, like the "langage pivot", developed in France in a software named Taiga, now called Aperto Libro in a commercial version (Inforama), and aprts of the technology were used by Arisem, a start-up, to launch a powerful info retrieval software.

    The NSA patent was filled on Aug. 10, 1999, and first proposed in April 97.

    The lambda first learned about it in October. From 'hacktivism', a thread originally posted on another mailing-l, by Mark Bowyer:

    "... According to an NSA fact sheet, their preferred method of information sorting and retrieval is "totally independent of particular languages or topics of interest, and relies for guidance solely upon examples provided by the user. It employs no dictionaries, keywords, stoplists, stemming, syntax, semantics, or grammar.
    A patent-number graciously provided at the end of the document led us to more detailed information. "The present invention uses a pattern-recognition technique based on n-gram comparisons among documents instead of the traditional keyword or context-based approach," the patent information specifies.
    We're not a hundred percent sure what that all means, but we sense it spells bad news for "Jam Echelon Day". The mindless insertion of keywords being urged upon would-be participants looks like a mere exercise. ...

     

     

    JAMED ?

    Militia Noise

     

    Andy Oram from the CPSR mailing-list forwarded a message from Spain, signed David Casacuberta <da5id@jet.es>, a leading member of FrEE group in Spain. Originally published in Spanish at the website Kriptopolis.com.

  • "... The proposal turns even more nonsense applied to Spain. In my country the more succesful initiative included keywords in Spanish, despite the fact that the original proposal stated that only words in English would be useful for the jamming.
  • "This is by any means not trivial. It is reasonable to imagine the NSA is not ruled by complete idiots, so they don't expect that a Corsican terrorist group, a Spanish drug dealer or Hezbolah member talk to each other in English, so ECHELON e-mail recognition software only surveils messages that are originated and/or go to the USA. So if a user in Barcelona send an e-mail to another user in Madrid with the famous keywords -no matter if in Spanish or English- this is a childish exercise because there is no Yank electronic ear listening."
  • "But the most unsettling even is -without a doubt- the political implications of the action ... The original proposal to jam ECHELON came from the "hacktivism" list ... Wired [reported the idea] came from an American group of so-called Lawyers for Constitution. The proposal from these lawyers included a keyword list that was slightly different from the original one in "hacktivism"; for example, it included words like "United Nations". ... Very few people claim it, but this group of lawyers have strong connections with fascist groups such as the American Militia ... If you take a close look to the keywords that have been circulating these days in Spain, you'll probably notice that they are mostly words to detect militias: bombing federal buildings that represent this New World Order incarnated in the United Nations... ."

    • True story: Linda Thompson, who introduces herself as "a Constitutional rights attorney and Chairman of the American Justice Federation", told a Wired reporter on Oct. 5:

  • "...Actually, this recent effort was started by Doug McIntosh in Indianapolis, Indiana, a reporter for AEN News, who wrote the original list. ... In 1992, our news network, AEN News, put out information on Echelon. Together, we revised the list and I wrote the message explaining what Echelon is and pointing to some Echelon articles. I just write more posts than he does so the tagline gets around more. ... Someone else apparently came up with the October 18 target date.

    • The target date was first Oct. 1st. Finaly Oct. 21. But never Oct. 18. Wired corrected its article.

     

    Echelon's copycat?

    HELIOS! HELLO¡

    Remember that France and Germany share some intelligence from a 90's projet with satellites listening stations (Helios-1A).

    Le Point, a French weekly, reported in 1998 on the matter. Communications Week made a very good round-up.

  • "According to the Le Point report, France targets the Intelsat and Inmarsat civilian communications satellites. One of the satellites used in the French surveillance project is the country's Hélios 1-A, in a program called Euracom. However, the satellite is said to have poor technical capacity for interception and re-transmission. As a result, in August 1995 the French reportedly began an experimental initiative called "Cerise" (Cherry) to intercept satellite communications. However, a larger follow-on project named Zenon had to be abandoned on budgetary grounds." ...

    • A most recent article by Le Point says the French Defense Ministry agreed with the weekly's story. (From The Tocqueville Connection)

  • "The DGSE for its part runs an important electronic eavesdropping base in Domme (Dordogne), and has just opened two new stations, in the United Arab Emirates and New Caledonia. The French, in liaison with Germany's BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst), also have established an electronic listening station at the Kourou space center, French Guiana, to eavesdrop on satellites orbiting over the Western Hemisphere. ... Although officials at the French defense ministry, which oversees the DGSE, refused to answer Le Point's questions when it was researching the story, they have since been more forthcoming. In a highly unusual statement, the chief of staff of the French defense ministry, François Roussely, in effect confirmed the existence of a national eavesdropping network. In Le Point's June 20 edition, he said the purpose of the French eavesdropping systems is "to follow the military dimensions of international crises, notably in areas where French forces may become engaged; to monitor the proliferation of non conventional arms; and for use in the struggle against terrorism. Because of the transnational character of these threats, collecting information sometimes requires means that go beyond the capabilities of individual states. For France, that means joining its partners in a search for solutions, notably technical solutions, that are suitable for warning against these dangers."

    •  

    SHORT CIRCUITS

    REBUILDING ONLINE FRONTIERS

    Windows NT = China's Evil Empire

    In its September 13 edition, China Youth Daily, the Communist Party's teenager branch newspaper, published what couldbe seen as an official call to protect China from internet-based "information hegemony and cultural infiltration!". Information security would be used as a shield against foreign influence.

    >From "No national borders on the Internet? No way!", China Youth Daily, 09/13/99

     
    "Some believe that national borders do not exist on the Internet. Absolutely not! Borders on the Internet are Internet security!
     
    "Some believe that the threats on the Web are only from "viruses" and "hackers." Absolutely not! There are also threats from information hegemony and cultural infiltration! ...
     
    "The attacks by computer "viruses" and "hackers," the infiltration of web culture, and the unfair invasion of the people who horde web information will politically deceive the people, cause economic losses, leak out classified military intelligence (and hence lose the power to command), and cause ideological chaos and social disturbances. ... Because of this, we can say that "web domination = territorial domination."...
     
    "Among the 3,700 websites in China now, 91% of them use Windows NT as the server operating system, and its stability and security cannot satisfy the need to protect the online territory. Web security products are being imported and used without independent rights and control. This will inevitably harbor dangers such as imbedded viruses, hidden passageways, and decodable passwords. Looking at the rule of the online game, the power to register Internet domain names, and the TCP/IP protocol commonly used on the Internet, we see these are in the hands of the US as well. Where is independence and self-control on the web?
     
    "... We must strengthen management of web security and legislation. We should establish a web security infrastructure ... speed the building of supporting systems, thereby reaching the goal of improving our network's ability to destroy enemies."

    TAKE CARE, JACK

    Crypto scam

     

    In order to prove the danger of the Electronic Commerce Bill last October, Malcolm Hutty from STAND in London launched "Operation Dear Jack". He sent a curious letter to the Head of the Home Office,to conclude Jack Straw "would be liable for 2 years in jail."

    Inside the letter: an encrypted confession to a real crime.

  • "The bill would make it another if you fail to give up the decryption key to a message if a policeman thinks you've got it; if you haven't got it, it is up to you to prove you haven't. If you can't prove it, you would be liable for 2 years in jail."

    • STAND generated a pair of RSA-based keys under the name of Jack Straw; and destroyed the decryption key.

  • "If the police ask you keep the demand to hand over the key secret, telling anyone would render you liable to 5 years in jail. So you couldn't complain - or explain your predicament - to the PM or Home Secretary, to the Chief Whip or a journalist, or even to another policeman.
  • "Happily for all of us, the E-Commerce Bill has not yet been enacted by Parliament, so we have not in fact set you up for jail time. "

    • GILC A l e r t

    Volume 3, Issue 6, September 21, 1999

    Free Expression
    [1] Bertelsmann Foundation recommends Net content rating system
    [2] GILC Member Statement for the Bertelsmann Internet Content Summit
    [3] Bertelsmann halts online sale of Hitler's "Mein Kampf"
    [4] Beijing Turns the Internet On Its Enemies
    Members of the Falun Gong sect in the United States, Britain and Canada have reported recent assaults on their World Wide Web sites. The members accuse Chinese security officials of being behind the harassment.
    [5] Twenty Enemies of the Internet - RSF released a report, naming twenty countries that may be described as real
    enemies of the new means of communication.
    [6] Umno to probe 48 websites
    Malaysian anti-defamation committee has identified 48 websites containing allegedly slanderous and defamatory accusations against the Government and will investigate them as it begins a more intensive effort to haul offenders to court.
    [7] Sex sites win case in Britain for real-sex videos
    The British Board of Film Censorship loses its attempt to prevent sale of pornographic films.
    [8] War of words over Australian Net censorship Controversy has arisen over Australian government censorship of the Internet.
    [9] Singapore to relax Internet censorship laws
     
    Privacy and Encryption
    [10] Japanese Parliament passes Wiretapping and National ID Bills
    [11] Sri Lanka row over e-mail 'espionage'
    A Sri Lankan Government minister has admitted in public that he intercepted a personal e-mail sent to the leader of the country's opposition. The opposition threatens nationwide protests over the privacy issue.
    [12] New US legislation deals compatibility and open systems People concerned with issues of product compatibility and open standards should take a look at the proposed Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act, which would determine rules for the distribution of software and computerized information.
    [13] U.S. Government proposal: break into homes to defeat encryption
    [14] Some info on the GILC webpage updates


    lambda / arQuemuse
    nov-dec 1999
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