Are you all listening ?

The Armed Forces and Electronics Communications & Electronics Association are holding A classified symposium (Top Secret/SI/TK) entitled Spring Intelligence Symposium on the theme "Lessons Learned: Building a New National Intelligence Partnership" @ the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center, Bolling AFB Washington, DC if you want to go contact Phil Jordan Phone: 703) 631-6219 or E-Mail jordan@afcea.org.

There are 26 pages of members , from Accenture (Andersen Consulting before it fell apart) to Zero Manufacturing who make snazzy aluminum, foam filled cases for fancy electronic gear.

One such outfit who will be showing some of their stuff will be Narus.

Who say on their website "Narus secures the health and profitability of Services over IP." What they don't say is that they help the US Government (and maybe many others) to snoop on telephone calls and Internet data lines.

Narus is derived from the Latin word "gnarus," which means (appropriately) "all knowing."

Founder Ori Cohen worked VDOnet, an Israeli video streaming software company. Cohen, a 33-year-old Israeli immigrant discovered that ISPs were reluctant to deploy streaming video products, because there was no way to bill the customers.

Cohen saw an opportunity, and he left to start Narus in about 1996.Want to know what Narus standard billing software can do? It can find out how much time you spent on the network, how many E-mails you sent, how long you played online video games, how many files you uploaded or downloaded and what web sites you accessed. "The idea is that a guy who sends only E-mails shouldn't be billed as much as the guy who is streaming video off the Internet,"

"It is not just billing, it is much more than billing," says President Mark Stone. Too right Mark.


Truthout has a story about a whistleblower, Mark Klein, a retired AT&T communications technician, who tells how a secret room was set up at AT & T where he worked in San Fransisco and also in Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego. The rooms contained fiber optic cables from the secret room which were tapping into the Worldnet (AT&T's internet service) circuits by splitting off a portion of the light signal."

The split circuits appear to have included traffic from peering links connecting to other internet backbone providers, meaning that AT&T was also diverting traffic routed from its network to or from other domestic and international providers. This setup also included using data-mining equipment called a Narus STA 6400, "known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for pre - programmed targets."

Which will all come as a great surprise to the Internet community !

Ben Rockwood's website will tell you more ...v. interesting.

Another place to look here