faulker064

(Updated: July 4, 2018) On August 15, The New York Times and Pro Publica published a story in which the big US telecommunications company AT&T was identified as a key partner of the NSA. Interesting details about this cooperation and the cable tapping were already in the 2008 book The Shadow Factory by James Bamford, but with the new story, also a number of clarifying documents from the Snowden-trove were disclosed. Among them are some powerpoint presentations that contain the slides which had been shown on Brazilian televion two years ago. They were first discussed on this weblog in January 2014. Here we will combine these new and old documents to provide a detailed picture of this important collection program, that was previously misunderstood on various occasions. - Context - Legal authorities - Tapping points - - Dataflow - Results - Domestic metadata - Conclusion - The AT&T switching center at 611 Folsom Street, San Francisco, where there's a cable access u...

(Updated: January 16, 2017) From a recent photo from the Oval Office, we learn that, probably last May, new telephones for non-secure calls have been installed in the White House. They replace older ones, that were used there since 1996. The new devices are IP phones , which means they run over an internal packet-switched IP network, instead of a traditional circuit-switched telephone network. The new Avaya 9608 The new device is a dark gray office phone, model 9608 , made by Avaya , which is a leading American manufacturer of telecommunications equipment. Avaya was previously part of Lucent Technologies, which was a spin-off of AT&T. This model is relatively simple, it's one that is commonly used in offices all over the world. It just has an average monochrome display - not a fancy color touch screen, like other high-end executive models from Avaya's 9600-series . Although that may look nice, for the president such features would not be of much use, as most of his calls ...

(Updated: September 21, 2017) Last Tuesday, June 23, the website Wikileaks (in cooperation with Libération and Mediapart ) published a number of NSA-documents showing that between 2006 and 2012, NSA had been able to eavesdrop on the phone calls of three French presidents. This is the first time we see actual finished intelligence reports that prove such eavesdropping, and being classified as TOP SECRET//COMINT-GAMMA they are much more sensitive than most of the documents from the Snowden-archive. Also it seems that these new Wikileaks-documents are not from Snowden, but from another source, which could be the same as the one that leaked a database record about NSA's eavesdropping on German chancellor Merkel. Update: On Monday, June 29, Wikileaks published two Information Need (IN) requests and five additional intelligence reports , but the latter are not as highly classified as the ones revealed earlier. - Intelligence reports - Tasking database records - A second source - ...

(Updated: March 17, 2017) Recently, a mysterious telephone was offered for sale at eBay . The device was made by the little-known company Tektron Micro Electronics, Inc. from Hanover, Maryland, and seems to be a secure phone for military use. Apart from the pictures shown below, nothing more is known about it, but maybe some readers of this weblog recognize the device and have some more information about its purpose and where it was used (see the update !) A Tektron secure military telephone (Photo via eBay - Click to enlarge) The phone comes without a handset, but it has a display and a common 12-button key pad, with some additional special purpose buttons. According to the seller, all of them are made of some kind of rubbery material instead of hard plastic. The big round buttons reveal that this is a secure phone, capable encrypting the calls: a green button with a green light for Secure and a red button with a (probably) red light for Non-Secure: Keypad of the Tektron telephone (P...