The story about the insecure Diebold electronic voting system recently
forwarded to Bugtraq was certainly disturbing, but here's something even
worse (though some of it is old news):
The Federal Bureau of Investigation administers the Communications
Assistance to Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which was passed by Congress
in 1994. [...] Every telephone switch installed in the U.S. since
1995 is supposed to have this surveillance capability [...]. Not only
can the authorities listen to your phone calls, they can follow those
phone calls back upstream and listen to the phones from which calls
were made.
[...]
The typical CALEA installation on a Siemens ESWD or a Lucent 5E or a
Nortel DMS 500 runs on a Sun workstation sitting in the machine room
down at the phone company. The workstation is password protected, but
it typically doesn't run Secure Solaris. It often does not lie behind
a firewall. Heck, it usually doesn't even lie behind a door. It has a
direct connection to the Internet because, believe it or not, that is
how the wiretap data is collected and transmitted.
[...]
Israeli companies, spies, and gangsters have hacked CALEA for fun and
profit, as have the Russians and probably others, too.
The full column is at:
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030710.html
--
Dan Harkless
bugtraq@harkless.org
http://harkless.org/dan/
