[Judgie]

While the oil still flows and the lights are still on, i thought I'd bring up the following............

No doubt there will be people here who have heard of the Narus Insight 6400, and in particular the legal problems that AT&T have been dealing with regarding the covert installation of aforementioned system and supporting hardware in one of their datacenters by the NSA.

This article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narus

fails to shed light on the actual hardware specifications of the device and what the OS is based on. Questions for budding PO.com techies:

(1)
Is it extremely likely that such a system would be running a highly modified variation of UNIX?

(2) Obviously, the system requires a stupendous amount of processing power in a (relatively) small footprint. It's my opinion that the system makes use of a large amount of Ultrasparc T2's

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UltraSPARC_T2

and in the previous Narus generation, T1's. IMHO, this is due to the natural orientation of the architecture to parallel processing of network traffic and web/database related duties, as well as the incredible hardware-native encryption/decryption engines (1 per core for a total of 8 per chip) in the T2. Each individual chip consisting of 8 cores can simultaneously process 64 threads. To top it off, power consumption is no worse than the current generation of X86 - 64 Server cpu's from AMD and Intel.

What say you?

[jboogy]

I didn't know you were bi-lingual Judgie , what is that ? Greek ?

[Judgie]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('jboogy', 'I') didn't know you were bi-lingual Judgie , what is that ? Greek ?

[Judgie]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ferrelgiraffe', 'T')he fiber optic interception capabilities have been linked with the US Army, DoD budgets, and various firms located on the Atlantic coast. US Army Central Command has also been affirmatively linked with the various contractors which integrate with the NARUS STA 6400 system.

The fiber optic-integration firm goes by two names, and is located in Miami, Florida: Terremark or TERRENAP. Abraxas, Narus, and Verizon jointly sponsored a conference in Hawaii.

Boeing, as discussed here appears to act as an integrating contractor linking the allegedly illegal intelligence gathering systems; with the allegedly illegal rendition and prisoner abuse efforts.

Specifically, this equipment was the Narus ST-6400, a machine that was capable of monitoring over 622 Mbits/second in real time in May, 2000, and capturing anything that hits its' semantic (i.e. the meaning of the content) triggers. The latest generation is called NarusInsight, capable of monitoring 10 billion bits of data per second.

-Universal data collection from links, routers, soft switches, IDS/IPS, databases, etc. provides total network view across the world's largest IP networks.

-Normalization, Correlation, Aggregation and Analysis provide a comprehensive and detailed model of user, element, protocol, application and network behaviors, in real time.

-Seven 9s reliability from data collection to data processing and analysis.

-Industry-leading packet processing performance that supports network speeds of up to OC-192 at layer 4 and OC-48 at layer 7, enabling carriers to monitor traffic at either the edge of the network or at the core.

-Unsurpassed and limitless scalability to support the world's largest, most complex IP networks.

-Unparalleled flexibility -- NarusInsight's functionality can easily be configured to meet any specific customer requirement (Narus Software Developer Kit -SDK).

-Unparalleled extensibility -- NarusInsight's functionality can easily be configured to feed a particular activity or IP service such as security, lawful intercept or even Skype detection and blocking.

How powerful is this? OC-192 carries about 10 gigabits of data per second. Ten billion bits per second, monitored in real-time. That is stunning.

It monitors 10 billion bits per second at level four and 2500 million bits per second at level seven. For reference, the 256K DSL line I am using equals .25 million bits per second. So one NarusInsight machine can look at about 39,000 DSL lines at once in great detail. That is a pretty damn big number. This is some really serious hardware with equally serious software.

These capabilities include playback of streaming media (i.e. VoIP), rendering of web pages, examination of e-mail and the ability to analyze the payload/attachments of e-mail or file transfer protocols. Narus partner products offer the ability to quickly analyze information collected by the Directed Analysis or Lawful Intercept modules. When Narus partners' powerful analytic tools are combined with the surgical targeting and real-time collection capabilities of Directed Analysis and Lawful Intercept modules, analysts or law enforcement agents are provided capabilities that have been unavailable thus far.

[BigTex]

I don't mean to get off the technical topic, but does this kind of hardware/software setup strike anyone as a solution more complicated than the problem? Can't this kind of strategy be defeated by the bad guy equivalent of the Navajo Code Talkers?

It seems like this may in some cases be useful, but I wonder how much more useful the exact number of dollars would be if they were spent training human resources in intelligence gathering (based on experience and intuition, not software programming), covert operations, special forces and languages. This kind of technology strikes me as providing a false sense of security and if it fails to detect something no one is held responsible.

[BigTex]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ferrelgiraffe', 'N')o one should get around it.
Everyone should only speak the praises of the lady president and her magnanimous grace for her unworthy subjects

[Judgie]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 's')o I work at a 7-eleven and I hope and pray and dream I have enough money at the end of the month to go the Olive Garden for their Primi Pasta special. But I don't. so I bag it at Mcky Dee's. What does this have to do with me?

[Judgie]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Judgie', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 's')o I work at a 7-eleven and I hope and pray and dream I have enough money at the end of the month to go the Olive Garden for their Primi Pasta special. But I don't. so I bag it at Mcky Dee's. What does this have to do with me?