When President Barack Obama signed the USA Freedom Act into law in June 2015, his action was widely promoted as the end one of the most controversial aspects of government-run “bulk metadata collection” under Section 215 of the Patriot Act. The Act supposedly curtailed mass interception of U.S. citizens’ call data records, including CDRs for voice and data traffic. But as close … [Read more...]
Google and Glimmerglass – 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Google's ramp-up in investment in undersea fiber optics is in the vanguard of content providers' bid for greater control of international communications — and will bring them face-to-face with the market leader in photonic switching and tapping, Glimmerglass Networks. Recall Google Corp's outrage over the 2013 Edward Snowden revelation that the NSA had effectively tapped all … [Read more...]
Machine Learning, Predictive Analytics – What’s Best for ISS?
Writing in The European Business Review, Big Data pundit Eric Siegal opines that predictive analytics is the backbone of the NSA's intelligence apparatus. Taking the podium at ISS World Americas today, Israel's Fifth Dimension takes a stand on deep learning, a branch of machine learning and AI, being the future of intelligence support systems that not only identify … [Read more...]
Equation Group and the Real Dunces of the Zero Day Leak – Cisco and Juniper
By now the news of a purported hack at the NSA revealing a 2013 suite of Zero Days, and their link to the agency's Technical Analytics Organization (TAO) aka The Equation Group, has been analyzed ad infinitum. Most conclude -- prematurely, we believe -- that the leak of such a large cache of Zero Day vulnerabilities and exploits represents a huge embarrassment for the NSA, as … [Read more...]
Is the Clock Really Ticking on NSA Mass Data Collection?
When the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the USA Freedom Act (H.R. 3361) last summer, the future looked grim for the NSA’s mass data collection program. The bill would have gutted Section 215 of the Patriot Act, placing severe restrictions on the terms by which government agencies can use the law to collect evidence. But in the months following the proposed … [Read more...]