First, Mr. Olbermann points out several inconsistencies within the Bush Administration’s handling of wiretapping.  Originally, the wiretaps required court orders.  Then interception of international communications are only for people with clear and known links to terrorist networks.  Mr. Tice states from his observations that ordinary citizens were [...]]]> Last week, on “Countdown with Keith Olbermann”, former NSA Analyst Robert Tice reported that the NSA spied on journalists as part of their Wiretapping program to root out terrorism.  The media has a way of editing/hyping stories, so let’s play Devil’s Advocate, and examine what the interview actually charges for violations of privacy rights.

First, Mr. Olbermann points out several inconsistencies within the Bush Administration’s handling of wiretapping.  Originally, the wiretaps required court orders.  Then interception of international communications are only for people with clear and known links to terrorist networks.  Mr. Tice states from his observations that ordinary citizens were also monitored:

… the National Security Agency had access to all Americans’ communications, faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications. And that doesn’t — it didn’t matter whether you were in Kansas, you know, in the middle of the country, and you never made a communication — foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications…

There is a bit of media hype to what Mr. Tice points out.  This has nothing to do with choosing the journalists’ communications or spying on domestic citizens.  This has to do with networks and the way modern monitoring works.

In the olden days, a telephone communication created an actual circuit aptly called a circuit switched network – one pair of wires connected from one side of the call to the other.  To listen in, a law enforcement official simply plugged themselves in between the single channel.  From the phone company’s standpoint, individual cir is somewhat inefficient and doesn’t scale well.  Eventually the phone systems went to what is called a packet switched network.  This method dices the communications into pieces, shipping them to the end caller through whatever direction they will reach the other end.  The pieces don’t need to follow the same path throughout the call.  In some communications, understanding the next piece depends on the previous piece.  In other words, it’s all or nothing.

Now follow what these facts imply: the tapping of terrorist communications requires gathering more than simply a couple of wires that cross the Atlantic.     Tice himself points out the difficulty of this situation:

Well, it’s actually, even for the NSA, it’s impossible to literally collect all communications. Americans tend to be a chatty group. We have the best computers at the agency, but certainly not that good.

So instead, the agency would inspect all of the “meta data”, or signaling information such as phone numbers, IP addresses, call length and the like.  The meta data allowed removal of numerous communications that don’t fit a profile so that analysts such as Mr. Tice may review a more manageable amount of information.  Mr. Tice recalled:

… in one of the operations that I was in, we looked at organizations just supposedly so that we would not target them. So that we knew where they were, so as not to have a problem with them.

Now, what I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7, and you know, 365 days a year, and it made no sense. … But an organization that was collected on were U.S. news organizations and reporters and journalists.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review affirmed the wiretaps were in fact not in conflict with the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirements for collection of foreign intelligence of American citizens.  This was a focused ruling, and does nothing with respect to other rights.  This includes such Constitutional heavyweights as the First Amendment, which directly references journalists:  “Congress shall make no law … abridging … the freedom of the press.”

In the second part of the interview, Olbermann cites the New Yorker Magazine article last year where, through a series of intertwined relationships, reporter Lawrence Wright’s daughter ended up as a person of interest connected to terrorism:

…the FBI had asked (Wright) about phone calls he made to a British lawyer who was representing former jihadist, calls the FBI thought were made by Wright‘s college aged daughter. More than wire-tapping was at work here. The name of Wright‘s daughters was not in the phone records. So how the hell, Wright demanded, did the FBI know his daughter‘s name.

It sounds like the NSA program worked.  The FBI handles domestic federal investigations.  Intelligence ended up in the FBI’s hands regarding an overseas, foreign telephone call discussing someone connected to a terrorist, albeit indirectly.  With the popularity of Universities in the 9/11 bombings and several cases since (a certain University of South Florida professor springs to mind), an investigator/analyst somewhere connected a couple of dots incorrectly.

The next rhetorical question: does the threat of being spied on cut short or curtail (definition of abridge) journalists.  I’m sure there’s a legal debate there somewhere.  As for putting together financial records, the government’s been tracking large money transfers for quite some time in an effort to fight drug money laundering, mob racketeering, and a whole host of other reasons.  Marrying that information to the wiretaps could limit false positives?

It’s all a slippery slope, and with the appointment of less conservative  judges over the next few years, maybe privacy rights will slide back towards those of the individual.  One thing’s for sure, there haven’t been any domestic terror acts in the last 8 years.  At what cost and whether it’s just luck is another story.

Here are links to the Olbermann/Tice video (part 1 and part 2) and transcripts (part 1 and part 2).

Postini’s background technology stems from threat assessment and message parsing capabilities, grown through several years as a primary mail provider. There are two major patents, with a variety of [...]]]> Postini is Google’s 2006 acquisition for secure messaging, and a direct competitor to IronPort. All of their offerings surround Software As A Service (SAAS), matching directly with Google’s overall technology strategy. They provide several services, including web security, anti-spam/malware, mail filtering, and archival with indexing. The Data Leakage Prevention capabilities provide privacy protections through outbound communication filters. Additionally, there are management tools and continuity procedures appropriate for enterprise use.

Postini’s background technology stems from threat assessment and message parsing capabilities, grown through several years as a primary mail provider. There are two major patents, with a variety of claims following each one. The first patent surrounds on-demand message scanning and routing. The geographically distributed Postini data centers proxy all communications (corporate, wired, wireless, portal, etc) and filter the communications appropriately, removing viruses, spam etc. The second patent centers on threat detection and control, and methods for generating and processing a sender/ISP/country’s reputation and then acting accordingly.

The technology doesn’t seem that revolutionary today, and the online documentation frequently references the existence of prior art not mentioned in the patents. However, from a security perspective, the techniques Postini uses are sound. Communications between Postini and corporate mail servers are TLS encrypted. This allows additional features for Data Leakage Prevention by both companies. The Intrusion Detection, Anti-virus, and Anti-spam filters are all independent of the networking infrastructure, and likely include best of breed solutions whenever there’s not a better trade secret/patent in-house. Postini uses portals and web services for sending messages to non-subscriber recipients. The portals guarantee messages are not susceptible to a man-in-the-middle attack.

The Message Security and Message Delivery services offer content filtering for Data Leakage Prevention. There are consoles and rule engines for policy definition, as well as canned Personally Identifiable Information (PII) controls for things like Social Security Numbers or credit card information. The GUI apparently delivers enough rule granularity to at least filter attachment types and perform in message word detection.

Postini’s technology does not address malicious insider activities and could be its biggest weakness. This becomes more of an issue when examining the Google addition of archival and search. Site administrators may configure Postini for secure communications between corporate partner mail servers, and even make this a policy based requirement for some message delivery. This secure communication eliminates privacy issues between the corporate email servers and the Postini data centers. It does not, however, account for a messages time on disk or in use. Trusted insiders at the sender’s or recipient’s locations may manipulate or view messages. From a third party point of view, administrators at the Postini sites could possibly have enough access to circumvent many of the same protections. On Postini’s provider end, at least within Google, record access rights are strictly controlled with procedure.

Google’s approach to pricing is the most attractive part of the Postini product.  It follows the principals of scale, expecting more consumers at a lower tipping point. For $3 annually per user, Postini provides inbound email filtering (Message Filtering) for viruses, trojans, spam, etc… At $12 annually, Postini does the same for outbound messaging and adds content and attachment conttrols as well as policy monitoring and centralized administration (Message Security). The $25 per year includes the archival and search features Google threw into the mix (Message Discovery).

Unfortunately, users found a problem with Google Street View shortly after its introduction. The camera’s caught people in the act – of whatever. It was sensationalized by the New York [...]]]> The idea is great. If you haven’t used it, check out the Street View button when using Google Maps. It’s interesting to see places you haven’t been on a virtual tour, similar to what the Realtors use for their online home tours. It doesn’t cover everywhere, simply because it requires feet on the street. However, most of the big metropolitan areas have at least some footage.

Unfortunately, users found a problem with Google Street View shortly after its introduction. The camera’s caught people in the act – of whatever. It was sensationalized by the New York Times coverage of the privacy of Mary Kalin-Casey’s cat. Wired Magazine even held a contest for the best pictures captured by the new Google maps extension, including the gentleman caught alongside the highway in San Bruno, CA relieving himself. It was kind of fun in a Where’s Waldo sense.

With the newest revision of their software, Google automatically blurs faces announcing,

“We’re also taking this opportunity to test our new face-blurring technology on the busy streets of Manhattan. This effort has been a year in the making — working at Street View-scale is a tough challenge that required us to advance state-of-the-art automatic face detection…”

Its anyone’s guess, but Google will likely replace existing street maps with the new sharper resolution and anonymized versions. They’re starting with Manhattan, for the obvious population density. We’ll see where they go next.

There are numerous applications of this sort of technology. The blurring itself is not that impressive. Cops have been doing it for those presumed innocent for years. And recognizing a face within a single frame is now built into cameras. Research into novel facial detection and search capabilities continues – it’s a tough problem, accounting for lighting, angles, profiles, etc. A product calling itself Google Portrait (although not affiliated with Google) finds pictures in a search I tried for Barack Obama.

The 2001 Tampa Super Bowl was the first big privacy splash with this sort of technology, where attendee’s faces were plucked from surveillance cameras and compared against a person of interest database. Critics considered this an invasion of privacy. In the debate, a UCLA law professor, Eugene Volokh rang in his opinion.

“There’s no Fourth Amendment problem if the government is simply observing — or even recording — what goes on in public,” Volokh says. “For constitutional purposes, that’s just not a ‘search,’ because there’s no legitimate expectation of privacy. Nobody thinks that their appearance at the Super Bowl is something that is hidden from the roving eye.”

For the original privacy issues, Google’s response appears manual, in several instances simply re-filming or deleting frames. Google will always have a tough problem on their hands. They warehouse more information than anyone else in the world. This latest feature shows the company’s commitment to its reputation; they listen to their customers, and when something becomes a front page headline, they react with cutting edge technology. If they don’t, you’ll be learning the rules and regulations they will face in legislation covered on the CIPP exam.

No matter how you slice it, the weakest point in any security program ends up being the end user. User training seems to work with frequency of message, but without hearing the importance of security it seems quickly forgotten.

That is of course, unless the message starts at the top with a strong corporate policy, well understood [...]]]> The Mitnick attack. The 10 attack. Social Engineering. Each of these emphasize how readily people part with valuable information to someone posing as an IT staffer, a very attractive member of the opposite sex, or someone friendly. You may now add candy bars and women…

No matter how you slice it, the weakest point in any security program ends up being the end user. User training seems to work with frequency of message, but without hearing the importance of security it seems quickly forgotten.

That is of course, unless the message starts at the top with a strong corporate policy, well understood consequences, and swift consistent enforcement. During my security training (I believe my CISSP), the instructor shared an example of a large, Canadian company with a zero-tolerance policy toward password disclosure. A Sr. V.P. within the company did just that with his secretary. During an audit, the IT staff discovered the VP logged in while on travel in 2 separate places, checking email. The VP was immediately terminated, the secretary put on probation.

This information trickery is the same idea as pre-texting in the privacy world . A caller (typically) phones a target under some false pretext, such as a survey or sweepstakes winnings. After ‘verifying’ enough publicly available information, such as name, street address, phone number, additional information is provided incorrectly or incompletely, typically date of birth, mother’s maiden name, bank where winnings may be deposited or social security number to report the winnings to the IRS.

Once armed with this information, the assailant calls in to the bank after ‘losing’ their checkbook, or simply requesting a change of address. From there, enough information is in in hand to (hopefully only) clear out the checking account, or continue with a complete identity theft. Banks and retail merchants are recognizing this trend and are putting further and further measures in place to protect their customers.

Security is one of the five domains integral to the Certified Information Privacy Professional (CIPP) and for good reason. The chocolate and the sweepstakes winner are the same problem, and mitigated through the same policy and training. Now if we could just convince the user populous – if it seems to good to be true – it probably is.