The Wall Street Journal reports today on Raytheon's snooping program, SilentRunner, which is claimed to be the best yet for snooping on computer users and for being undetectable by ordinary computer users. It utilizes a TA algorithm to search for suspicious patterns as well as keywords. Crypto in particular can be singled out as well as other non-ordinary communication. It passed NSA's SPOCK evaluation. Several unnamed spy, law and gov agencies have purchased copies at $65,000 a pop. The program was invented by ex-spooks. While available for select clients months ago it is being publicly announced today as a great tool for snooping on workers. Here's Raytheron's site for it: http://www.raytheon.com/c3i/c3iproducts/c3i021/c3i021.htm And a brochure in PDF: http://www.raytheon.com/c3i/c3iproducts/c3i021/images/srunner.pdf A related item: As part of Lockheed Martin's settlement agreement with the USG for illegally exporting satellite technology, it has agreed to use $5M of the $12M fine to set up a computer access system for the USG to tap into all LMCO's export deals in order to monitor the firms activities. Which raises the question of what other US exporters have similar real-time tapping of their export deals. If there are any, would such arrangements be known to the technologists, say, at ZKS, NAI, MS, RSA, IBM, Cylink, HavenCo ... well, not the last -- maybe not yet. Or are the taps there but covertly, even to investors. Which comes back to SilentRunner's, and similar program's, claims of being undetectable. How does SilentRunner compare to DIRT? Are there defenses against these sneakthieves?
