Posts

Showing posts from March, 2014

Some SIGINT and COMSEC during the Nuclear Security Summit

Image
(UPDATED: May 17, 2014) On March 24 and 25, the third Nuclear Security Summit (NSS) is held in The Hague, the seat of the government of the Netherlands. As 58 world leaders will be present, including US president Obama, the summit takes place under severe security measures. Here we will take a look at some noticable things on the Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) and Communications Security (COMSEC) front, especially regarding the American president. When some new details or pictures come up, they will be added. US presidential motorcade On the morning of Monday, March 24, president Obama flew in aboard Air Force One , accompanied by all the famous vehicles like the helicopters which become Marine One when he is aboard, and the cars of the presidential motorcade . As can be seen in this video , there are actually 4 identical and heavily armored presidential limousines, so two motorcades with each two identical limousines can be formed - so no one knows which one is carrying the president.

Video demonstration of two intelligence analysis tools

Image
(Updated: May 9, 2015) In a previous article we provided a very extensive description of a communications analysis tool used by the Canadian agency CSEC. Here we will show two video demonstrations of analysis tools which are used by intelligence and law enforcement agencies all over the world: Sentinel Visualizer and Analyst's Notebook. Sentinel Visualizer The first intelligence analysis program is Sentinel Visualizer , which was developed by FMS Advanced Systems Group. This is a 'minority-owned' small business founded in 1986 and based in Vienna, Virginia, which provides custom software solutions to customers in over 100 countries. This video shows a demonstration of how the Sentinel Visualizer software program can be used to analyse telephony metadata in order to discover new targets: FMS claims that In-Q-Tel , the CIA's venture capital arm is an investor in FMS, apparently in order to improve their products so they can fit the needs of the CIA. FMS also claims that

OLYMPIA: How Canada's CSEC maps phone and internet connections

Image
On October 6, 2013, the Brazilian television program Fantástico revealed the existance of a software program called OLYMPIA. In this case, the program was used by the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC) to map the telephone and computer connections of the Brazilian Ministry of Mines and Energy (MME). OLYMPIA is a sophisticated software framework that combines access to a range of databases and analytic tools. It's used to discover and identify the telephone and computer infrastructure used by potential targets. This information can then be used for setting up tapping, bugging and/or hacking operations. OLYMPIA itself does not collect any actual content of communications. In this article we take a close look at the OLYMPIA tool, based on the powerpoint presentation that was first shown on Brazilian television on October 6, 2013. On November 30, the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail published most of the slides on its website. Here, all available slides are pul