FBI Wiretapping Audit Secrets Uncovered Via Ctrl+C

mytrip notes a story in Wired's Threat Level blog on the latest boneheaded government moves with redaction. (We've been discussing redaction follies here for years.) This time it's an FBI report (PDF) on implementing CALEA — you can select text from redacted areas, copy it, and paste into a text editor, as University of Pennsylvania professor Matt Blaze discovered. From Wired: "Once again, supposedly sensitive information blacked out from a government report turns out to be visible by computer experts armed with the Ctrl+C keys — and that information turns out to be not very sensitive after all... [Among] the tidbits considered too sensitive to be aired publicly: The FBI paid Verizon $2,500 apiece to upgrade 1,140 old telephone switches. Oddly the report didn't redact the total amount paid to the telecom — slightly more than $2.9 million dollars — but somehow the bad guys will win if they knew the number of switches and the cost paid."

It's easy...

[johannesg]

Look, the point of blacking out is not just to remove critical information, it is also to get you used to large parts of documents being blacked out. It is a way of hiding a signal within a lot of noise.

By randomly blacking out stuff, you will never know if there is vital information hiding underneath the black text. And you will become more and more accepting of documents that have barely any text at all.

The purpose is, of course, to allow more and more freedom to the agencies doing the blacking out. And less and less to you.

The New Math

[nqz]

Maybe the FBI should stick to something, like wiretapping for example, rather than performing simple math for a report ... 1140 x $2,500 $2.9 million (see the reverse pacman sign)

Re:Too much UNIX for me

[mikael_j]

I think my problem is that for regular *nix I don't use KDE or Gnome and thus I'm still using what I'm used to (mark + middle click to paste) from when I started using X11, and for macs I find myself either drag'n'dropping or using cmd+c which has become differentiated from ctrl+c in my mind (as I use ctrl+c to shut down processes, not copy data).

/Mikael

Be happy its still number of switches

[AHuxley]

In the USA you still only have to do the math on the 'number' and 'quality' of roving witetaps.
The use of public or released data to see what police forces are doing is interesting.
In India you have to count the number of dead.
"The records show that Durgiyana Mandir ground was one of three cremation sites in Amritsar
illegally used by the police.
It takes about 300kg of wood to burn a single body and each wood purchase is written in a register.
The police subverted the system, by burning more than one body on each pyre.

http://news.sbs.com.au/dateline/india__who_killed_the_sikhs_130052 [sbs.com.au] [sbs.com.au]

this isn't about national security

[Anonymous Coward]

The FBI paid Verizon $2,500 apiece to upgrade 1,140 old telephone switches. Oddly the report didn't redact the total amount paid to the telecom â" slightly more than $2.9 million dollars â" but somehow the bad guys will win if they knew the number of switches and the cost paid.

This is not about giving too much information to the enemy (whatever the current boogie man is). This is about PR and keeping the public misinformed, while pandering to their national security concerns.

"We spent 2.9 million US$ on improving our communication system" will trigger a "Great! That's tax dollars well spent!" while on the other hand a "We paid 2500 US$ for each of the 1140 telephones we recently purchased" will earn you a "WTF? Is that what our tax money is wasted for??"

according to TFA...

[DragonTHC]

the FBI had spent $500 Million for these sort of upgrades. If verizon only cost them $2.9 million, and the other carriers cost only slightly more, where's the other $475 million dollars?

Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

The calia network as outlined originally, would have used a fraction of the switches. That number of switches indicates that they were monitoring a LOT more. IOW, this was not about wireless but about the entire world wide network. FBI is tapping all of Verizon.

The one big embarrassment out of that, is that it shows that they had total access to the network, and yet 9/11 occurred. So, does that mean that this was not being used for terrorism, or does this indicate that we did know and ignored what was to happen.

The naivete!

[wfolta]

It hurts my brain. The person who (incompetently) redacted the document was probably just following guidelines. My guess is that there's a guideline that says that specific numbers and costs cannot be published in reference to secure systems used by an intelligence or law enforcement agency. Only aggregate costs, as necessary to inform the public and lawmakers.

No conspiracy. No corruption. No deeper meaning than a guideline that requires sticking your neck out and making a case if you want to violate it.

Makes sense, actually, as most intelligence gathering is probably not about sentences like, "John Doe is our super-secret mole in the office of the director", but rather "the phone system has 1100 switches for all of North America, and is taken down every 2 weeks at 1 am for maintenance."

And this leaves me wondering if those who are laughing or outraged at the attempted redaction (as opposed to the incompetence in implementing it) are also the same people who insist that they must have military-grade encryption and anonymous re-routing, using spread-spectrum wireless transmissions to public access facilities, in order to protect their private emails to grandmother. Sigh.

Re:Not everything is censorship.

[morgan_greywolf]

Correct. All non-classified government contracts can be had through FOIA request. Some agencies even post information about some of their contracts online on their website -- no FOIA required.