Data Mining

Voices of Resistance from Occupied London | There is nothing comparable at all in the U.S. to the apparatus of surveillance that exists in London. Even CCTV cameras are only recently becoming an issue in the U.S. Total surveillance of down town areas of American cities is something I wrote about in the early nineties but only applied to tiny areas, a few acres in down town Los Angeles for example. If Giuliani does become president we will get closer to the idea of having total surveillance and control in the city centre but London is at least one if not two generations ahead of the United States.

Ever wonder how the FBI monitors an Activists telephone or email?

Well The Loyal Nine is going to blow the lid off that for you. Basically federal agents have a tool called DCS-3000. I know it sounds like some kind of power engine but its not. Its a windows based application that any agent can install on their workstation or laptop. It gives them the instant ability to wiretap any phone, email, text message account, Instant messenger account, VOIP account... basically anything you can think of, in less then 3 clicks of a mouse.

The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.

The FBI bit off some controversy in 2000 when it acknowledged it was using a custom packet sniffer called Carnivore to effect court-authorized surveillance of internet traffic.

Some network operators were uncomfortable with g-men barging in their colo to hang a black box off their network, while civil libertarians chaffed at the bureau's legally adventuresome use of some of Carnivore's features with perfunctory court notice instead of a  full-blown wiretap order.

The feds responded by giving the tool a less-ominous moniker, DCS-1000, and getting the law changed. They later put the tool out to pasture in  favor of commercial solutions.