faulker064

Today is the 5-year anniversary of this weblog, so this time we will look back at the main developments and the highlights from the 108 articles that have been published here so far. The very first posting was on January 18, 2012, and contained a video about the White House Situation Room , providing a nice look at the telecommunications equipment used at the highest level of the US government. The first header of this weblog from January 2012, showing communications equipment in the watch center of the US National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) Initially, this weblog was called Top Level Telecommunications, as it was the intention to write about the communications equipment used by high-level government and military officials. This fills a gap, because about crypto equipment for secure communications, there were already some very good websites, like those from Jerry Proc and the Dutch Crypto Museum , while for example the White House Museum and Cryptome provided great photos of t...

(Updated: January 31, 2017) Over the past five years, a range of articles on this weblog covered the secure and non-secure phones used by president Barack Obama , whether in the White House, at his Summer residence or aboard Air Force One. With Donald Trump taking over the US presidency in a few days, it's a good moment to look back and provide a comprehensive overview of the communications equipment during Obama's time in office. Additional context for this was provided by a background story from the New York Times from April last year, as well as by several other sources, which show an almost complete overhaul of the communication systems of the Obama White House. Preparations under George W. Bush For the communications systems used by the president of the United States it was more important to be reliable, than to be up-to-date, and so the equipment often served decades, almost until the moment that there are few officials left who know how to maintain it. Modernization s...

(Updated: January 7, 2017) Shortly before the recent US presidential election, a dedicated cybersecurity hotline with Moscow was used by president Obama to warn the Russian government not to interfere with the election process through hacking operations. Press reports compared the cybersecurity with the "Red Phone", which many people believe is used on the Hotline between Washington and Moscow. That's not true, and also Obama's message seems not to have been transmitted by phone, but through an e-mail channel which is maintained by the Nuclear Risk Reduction Center (NRRC). The Nuclear Risk Reduction Center (NRRC) at the US State Department, which also maintains the cybersecurity communications link between US and Russian Computer Emergency Readiness Teams (screenshot from a State Department video) Obama's message The fact that on October 31, US president Obama sent the Russians a direct message through the cyber channel was first reported on December 16. Three d...

( Updated : March 24, 2018) Since the Snowden-revelations, several countries adopted new laws governing their (signals) intelligence agencies, but instead of restricting the collection capabilities, they rather expand them. Previously we examined the new laws that have recently been implemented in France . This time we will take a look at the Netherlands, where a new law for its two secret services is now being discussed by the parliament. The situation in the Netherlands is different in at least two major aspects from many other countries. First, there is no institutional separation between domestic security and foreign intelligence as the two secret services combine both tasks. Second, the current law restricts bulk or untargeted collection to wireless communications only, so cable access is only allowed for targeted and individualized interception. - Secret services - Oversight bodies - Towards a new law - - Bulk cable access - Cyber security - Third party hacking - - Update...