Global Spying Presentation @ Blackhat

Xero Networks and CryptoHippie have been accepted for a joint presentation to provide indepth details about government spy techniques and programs at the Blackhat conference in Las Vegas this July. For those of you who can attend, please let us know and we will arrange special access to a private event. For those of you who cannot, video and documents will be made available afterwards.

Here is a tiny excerpt from the intro:

Hope to see you there!

 

I am sure they have ressources you only have to turn on your net sniffer then you can see their system and what I see there is cheeky, cocky and ruthless last but not least their communication level is very low and primitive related to some packets where I took a closer look. I mean internet was always surveilled, imho, since its existence in one or another way.

 

This sounds very interesting Steve! I doubt that I will be able to attend (although I would love to). I hope the video and documents will be plentiful!

 

I wish I could make it! I do have a question though. I saw the video of Mark Klein (former ATT technician) and he said that they were copying all internet communications. So if they copied everything, could they not go back and grab anything that they like?

 

The cost of storing everything forever is prohibitive. What they have to do is have a short retention cache and do types of analysis to find the "interesting" things they should keep, and interesting people they should keep tabs on.

 

Hi caspian,

Since not all Internet communications pass through the US, it is impossible for them to collect everything on the Internet, i.e. they only collect what passes through U.S. Internet pathways that include their collection hubs such as the much talked abouot one in San Francisco that captures traffic coming in over the Pacific Internet backbone (afaik), and there must be at least another collection hub in New York for the Atlantic Internet backbone.

-- Tom

 

Tom, I believe there are more than 8 such collection centers in the US. You may also be astounded to know that most traffic in the world passes through the US through these exchanges.

Update: Read more about it at Wired