Hmm, Maybe but Don’t Know for Sure

I am not one for grand conspiracy theories. They are too hard to maintain in reality and most can likely be explained by bumbling ineptitude. But even this observation as a body of truth to it. You’re not going to stumble across a secret map of the network. But every major corporation has in their IT department a map of the major nodes of their network and who the carrier is and the the associated end nodes for those routes. So it is entirely plausible it is what is stated in the article. Or as likely it goes to Army Defense command. —

A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier’s systems, exposing customers’ voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003.

“What I thought was alarming is how this carrier ended up essentially allowing a third party outside their organization to have unfettered access to their environment,” Babak Pasdar, now CEO of New York-based Bat Blue told Threat Level. “I wanted to put some access controls around it; they vehemently denied it. And when I wanted to put some logging around it, they denied that.”

Pasdar won’t name the wireless carrier in question, but his claims are nearly identical to unsourced allegations made in a federal lawsuit filed in 2006 against four phone companies and the U.S. government for alleged privacy violations. That suit names Verizon Wireless as the culprit.

Pasdar has executed a seven-page affidavit for the nonprofit Government Accountability Project in Washington, which on Tuesday began circulating the document (.pdf), along with talking points (.doc), to congressional staffers hashing out a Republican proposal to grant retroactive legal immunity to phone companies who cooperated in the warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

But you know for all the fancy tacking, links and DS3 lines, if the content is encrypted it will take time for anyone to crack it. Oh yeah the NSA has supercomputers that can crank this stuff. But even hackers are getting smart and are using polymorphic techniques to mask signatures. So polymorphic cypers would make the cracking job very hard. You would have to assure you got all the pieces of the message and have to crack each message segment individually.

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