The FBI provided me with a statement for my article on its "port reader" metadata surveillance software. Here it is in full:
"Pen Register and Trap and Trace orders grant law enforcement the authority to collect dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information associated with a target's communications. This information includes source and destination IP addresses and port numbers. In circumstances where a provider is unable to comply with a court order utilizing its own technical solution(s), law enforcement may offer to provide technical assistance to meet the obligation of the court order."
"Pen Register and Trap and Trace orders grant law enforcement the authority to collect dialing, routing, addressing, or signaling information associated with a target's communications. This information includes source and destination IP addresses and port numbers. In circumstances where a provider is unable to comply with a court order utilizing its own technical solution(s), law enforcement may offer to provide technical assistance to meet the obligation of the court order."
It's a valid question but about a different topic. This piece is about the contours of what the FBI can get from Internet traffic with a PR/TT order, and technology employed in service of that goal, once a criminal or FISA investigation is underway. Whether these investigations can be initiated on false premises -- and certainly we've seen that in the CP context with open WiFi networks -- is an important but different question.Aug 2, 2013
What's significant about this is the NSA's ability to tap into TOR Routed traffic.Aug 2, 2013
The problem is that to track Tor traffic, you need to have full traffic monitoring of enough of the Tor network that you have a decent shot of guaranteeing that you can see every hop a packet makes. And there's some 4,000 Tor relay nodes active these days - many of which are in countries that are unlikely to bend over and give the NSA a traffic tap.
The second problem is that even if you can track and identify all Tor traffic, it may prove to be a lot less useful than you might think - because now you have a bunch of information that you can't actually act on without revealing that Tor is compromised. We hit that same problem when we broke the Enigma during WWII - we actually let German U-boats sinks several dozen convoys because warning the convoys of U-boat activity in the area would have let the Germans know that Enigma was broken.Aug 4, 2013
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