Whistle-Blower: Feds Have a High-Speed Backdoor Into Wireless Carrier

["Paul Ferguson" <fergdawg () netzero net>]

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Via Threat Level.

[snip]

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.

[snip]

More:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/03/whistleblower-f.html

- - ferg

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--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawg(at)netzero.net
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/


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