Big Brother

[roach]

A major US ISP which is a subsidiary of a foreign corporation hosts a US government operation to monitor all traffic handled by the ISP at a central network operations center. This operation was set up as a condition for the foreign corporation to acquire the ISP and as far as known is not the result of a court order. No officer or employee of the foreign corporation or the ISP subsidiary has access to or control over the operation. Traffic is monitored by personnel who have security clearances for handling confidential information acquired by monitoring. Streaming data may be searched for key words or other information, collected and transmitted to the sponsoring agency for analysis and evaluation.

The representative claims that another US government surveillance activity set up after September 11 is for ISPs to host sites set up to offer information likely to be sought by terrorists, such as detailed airline schedules or other dangerous information. The logs of access to these sites are copied to CDs daily and sent to the supervising agency. ISP personnel are forbidden to monitor the sites or examine the logs. Numerous US ISPs are allegedly involved in this activity. As far as known this activity is not the result of a court order.

Cryptome would appreciate learning more about such non-court-ordered governmental Internet monitoring for publication here. In particular, leads on information on the central monitoring operation at the foreign-owned ISP -- which sounds like a description of Verio, Cryptome's host, now owned by Japan's NTT Corporation. At the time of NTT's purchase of Verio, there were news reports of FBI objection to the sale unless arrangements were made to prevent foreign espionage and to avoid interference with lawful interceptions.

Cryptome has no knowledge that its logs are forwarded to officials but it would be a snap to do -- our two machines are located in Virginia (Cryptome) and California (JYA), traces below. So consider anonymizing your visits.

Anonymous contributions welcomed. Encrypt if preferred. Public key on Cryptome home page. Send to: jya@pipeline.com

www.cryptome.org

roach