(network)technologies used by NSA for data collection
Hi, I watched "Citizenfour"(imdb.com/title/tt4044364/) documentary and at 41:12 Edward Snowden gives a brief overview of some of the leaked documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill. At 42:57 Snowden mentions devices which are able to collect data at rate of 1Tbps. This was in 2011. Screen-shots from the movie can be seen here: https://nsa.gov1.info/dni/2014/tumult.jpg Third slide looks like some sort of vendor product roadmap :) Just out of curiosity, what kind of equipment those might be? Is it realistic that NSA/DoD are able to produce their own hardware? Let alone custom silicon like Cisco or Juniper are. Or do they use off the self hardware.. In addition, it's relatively easy to install a passive fiber optical tap for a submarine cable, but how do you get information out of it? I mean all the different wavelengths(CWDM/DWDM) within the same cable, line rates(up to 100GigE), circuit switched and packet switched technologies which those devices should support.. In addition, how(bandwidth and network wise) to transport this data to data analysis and storage equipment if it collected far away from USA.. Some of those questions or thoughts might be naive and stupid, but that's what crossed my mind when I watched the documentary. Maybe somebody, who has done more research in this field, could clarify. thanks, Martin
They're Narus (Boeing now) STA 6400s most likely. They've been using these for a few years now. Jason Bothe, Manager of Networking Rice University o +1 713 348 5500 m +1 713 703 3552 jason@rice.edu
On Mar 21, 2015, at 21:05, Martin T <m4rtntns@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
I watched "Citizenfour"(imdb.com/title/tt4044364/) documentary and at 41:12 Edward Snowden gives a brief overview of some of the leaked documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill. At 42:57 Snowden mentions devices which are able to collect data at rate of 1Tbps. This was in 2011. Screen-shots from the movie can be seen here: https://nsa.gov1.info/dni/2014/tumult.jpg Third slide looks like some sort of vendor product roadmap :) Just out of curiosity, what kind of equipment those might be? Is it realistic that NSA/DoD are able to produce their own hardware? Let alone custom silicon like Cisco or Juniper are. Or do they use off the self hardware.. In addition, it's relatively easy to install a passive fiber optical tap for a submarine cable, but how do you get information out of it? I mean all the different wavelengths(CWDM/DWDM) within the same cable, line rates(up to 100GigE), circuit switched and packet switched technologies which those devices should support.. In addition, how(bandwidth and network wise) to transport this data to data analysis and storage equipment if it collected far away from USA.. Some of those questions or thoughts might be naive and stupid, but that's what crossed my mind when I watched the documentary. Maybe somebody, who has done more research in this field, could clarify.
thanks, Martin
Sorry. I got trigger happy. The STAs can read data Rey efficiently from multiple wavelengths or grey light simultaneously. Jason Bothe, Manager of Networking Rice University o +1 713 348 5500 m +1 713 703 3552 jason@rice.edu
On Mar 21, 2015, at 21:05, Martin T <m4rtntns@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
I watched "Citizenfour"(imdb.com/title/tt4044364/) documentary and at 41:12 Edward Snowden gives a brief overview of some of the leaked documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill. At 42:57 Snowden mentions devices which are able to collect data at rate of 1Tbps. This was in 2011. Screen-shots from the movie can be seen here: https://nsa.gov1.info/dni/2014/tumult.jpg Third slide looks like some sort of vendor product roadmap :) Just out of curiosity, what kind of equipment those might be? Is it realistic that NSA/DoD are able to produce their own hardware? Let alone custom silicon like Cisco or Juniper are. Or do they use off the self hardware.. In addition, it's relatively easy to install a passive fiber optical tap for a submarine cable, but how do you get information out of it? I mean all the different wavelengths(CWDM/DWDM) within the same cable, line rates(up to 100GigE), circuit switched and packet switched technologies which those devices should support.. In addition, how(bandwidth and network wise) to transport this data to data analysis and storage equipment if it collected far away from USA.. Some of those questions or thoughts might be naive and stupid, but that's what crossed my mind when I watched the documentary. Maybe somebody, who has done more research in this field, could clarify.
thanks, Martin
I see, thanks! However, this all requires at least some level of Internet operator cooperation? For example if ISP in Northern Europe owns a sub-marine cable between Finland and Sweden and they decide to upgrade their legacy Nortel equipment with STM-64 line-card in both ends of the cable to a Juniper T1600 core routers with 100GigE line-cards, then it's not possible that intelligence agency equipment supports this, is it? In addition, how is the collected data transported for storing in (NSA) datacenters and later analysis? I guess the data collection actually has to be fairly selective simply because the amount of data is so huge. For example take the large Internet Exchanges where several Tbps of data are exchanged in peak hours each day. thanks, Martin On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 4:29 AM, Jason Bothe <jason@rice.edu> wrote:
Sorry. I got trigger happy. The STAs can read data Rey efficiently from multiple wavelengths or grey light simultaneously.
Jason Bothe, Manager of Networking
Rice University
o +1 713 348 5500
m +1 713 703 3552
jason@rice.edu
On Mar 21, 2015, at 21:05, Martin T <m4rtntns@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
I watched "Citizenfour"(imdb.com/title/tt4044364/) documentary and at 41:12 Edward Snowden gives a brief overview of some of the leaked documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill. At 42:57 Snowden mentions devices which are able to collect data at rate of 1Tbps. This was in 2011. Screen-shots from the movie can be seen here: https://nsa.gov1.info/dni/2014/tumult.jpg Third slide looks like some sort of vendor product roadmap :) Just out of curiosity, what kind of equipment those might be? Is it realistic that NSA/DoD are able to produce their own hardware? Let alone custom silicon like Cisco or Juniper are. Or do they use off the self hardware.. In addition, it's relatively easy to install a passive fiber optical tap for a submarine cable, but how do you get information out of it? I mean all the different wavelengths(CWDM/DWDM) within the same cable, line rates(up to 100GigE), circuit switched and packet switched technologies which those devices should support.. In addition, how(bandwidth and network wise) to transport this data to data analysis and storage equipment if it collected far away from USA.. Some of those questions or thoughts might be naive and stupid, but that's what crossed my mind when I watched the documentary. Maybe somebody, who has done more research in this field, could clarify.
thanks, Martin
On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 04:05:35AM +0200, Martin T wrote:
Hi,
I watched "Citizenfour"(imdb.com/title/tt4044364/) documentary and at 41:12 Edward Snowden gives a brief overview of some of the leaked documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill. At 42:57 Snowden mentions devices which are able to collect data at rate of 1Tbps. This was in 2011. Screen-shots from the movie can be seen here: https://nsa.gov1.info/dni/2014/tumult.jpg Third slide looks like some sort of vendor product roadmap :) Just out of curiosity, what kind of equipment those might be? Is it realistic that NSA/DoD are able to produce their own hardware? Let alone custom silicon like Cisco or Juniper are. Or do they use off the self hardware.. In addition, it's relatively easy to install a passive fiber optical tap for a submarine cable, but how do you get information out of it? I mean all the different wavelengths(CWDM/DWDM) within the same cable, line rates(up to 100GigE), circuit switched and packet switched technologies which those devices should support.. In addition, how(bandwidth and network wise) to transport this data to data analysis and storage equipment if it collected far away from USA.. Some of those questions or thoughts might be naive and stupid, but that's what crossed my mind when I watched the documentary. Maybe somebody, who has done more research in this field, could clarify.
NSA has had in-house chip fab facilities for at least 10 years, probably closer to 20, and possibly as much as 30, as well as working agreements with big network gear manufacturers. -- Mike Andrews, W5EGO mikea@mikea.ath.cx Tired old sysadmin
This stuff is soo cool :D I understands less than half of it, but I have found this link that give some light. https://robert.sesek.com/2014/9/unraveling_nsa_s_turbulence_programs.html It seems they had a system to backup 3 days of the internet, all data. But such system failed because Internet generated too much data. So Turmoil is a programmable event based filter, detect events and when the event is triggered, save data from the stream. So they generate as much data they want or can handle. -- -- ℱin del ℳensaje.
participants (4)
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Martin T -
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Tei