Mubarak’s Israeli-Created Internet spyware

Posted on 2011 January 29
Courtesy Of "Richard Brenneman"

The same company that developed the controversial spy-tech the U.S. National Security Agency to monitor all the digital traffic flowing through global telecommunications was hired by Hosni Mubarak’s government to snoop on Egyptians.

The story gets even stranger when you add in the fact that the company, Narus, was founded by tech wizards  reported to have strong ties to Unit 8300, the Israeli equivalent of the NSA, and financed by an Israeli venture capital firm.

The company, which was created in the U.S., has since been acquired by Boeing, a leading military/industrial complex powerhouse.

On 17 July 2009 AltAssets reported the role the company plays in Egyptian security:

Narus’ system protects and manages the largest IP networks in the US and around the world, some of which include: KT (Korea), KDDI (Japan), Raytheon, Telecom Egypt, Reliance (India), Sify (India), Cable and Wireless, Saudi Telecom, US Cellular and Pakistan Telecom Authority, according to a statement.

“Narus is proud to be an important part of protecting and managing the cyber infrastructure, especially in these difficult economic times,” said Greg Oslan, CEO of Narus. “We are pleased to be able to count on our current investors’ continued support for the growth of our business. We look forward to working with our investors, partners and customers through the next stage of our growth.”

Jenn Ettinger of the media advocacy group Freepress.net sounded an alarmFriday:

A U.S. company appears to have sold Egypt technology to monitor Internet and mobile phone traffic that is possibly being used by the ruling regime to crack down on communications as protests erupt throughout the country. Boeing-owned, California-based company Narus sold Telecom Egypt, the state-run Internet service provider, “real-time traffic intelligence” equipment, more commonly known as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) technology. DPI is content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from Internet users and mobile phones as it passes through routers on the Web.

The company is also known for creating “NarusInsight,” a supercomputer system allegedly used by the National Security Agency and other entities to perform mass surveillance and monitoring of public and corporate Internet communications in real time.

Narus Vice President of Marketing Steve Bannerman said to Wired in 2006: “Anything that comes through (an Internet protocol network), we can record. We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their [Voice Over Internet Protocol] calls.”

The company’s tech is also able to monitor Skype calls, overcoming what had been a vexing problem for electronic snoops.

Robert McMillan of IDG News Service [via IT World] offers more disturbing details about the capabilities of Narus technology:

Narus is developing a new technology that sleuths through billions of pieces of data on social networks and Internet services and connects the dots.

The new program, code-named Hone, is designed to give intelligence and law enforcement agencies a leg up on criminals who are now operating anonymously on the Internet.

In many ways, the cyber world is ideal for subversive and terrorist activities, said Antonio Nucci, chief technology officer with Narus. “For bad people, it’s an easy place to hide,” Nucci said. “They can get lost and very easily hide behind a massive ocean of legal digital transactions.”

It’s trivial to set up a Gmail or Facebook account under a fake name. The question for law enforcement then becomes, how does it connect different pieces of information to the same person? “It’s very hard to connect these two pieces of information,” Nucci said. “We’re really asking [law enforcement] to become almost like magicians.”

Narus is best known as the creator of NarusInsight, an network monitoring device that can analyze traffic on IP networks. AT&T allegedly used a Narus system to wiretap customer data on behalf of the U.S. National Security Agency as part of a U.S. domestic terrorist surveillance program.

Hone works in tandem with NarusInsight. By Nucci’s own admission, however, it can do some pretty “scary” things.

The software’s user creates a target profile, and Hone then proceeds to link what Nucci calls “islands of information.” Hone can analyze VOIP conversations, biometrically identify someone’s voice or photograph and then associate it with different phone numbers.

“I can have a sample of your voice in English, and you can start

speaking Mandarin tomorrow. It doesn’t matter; I’m going to catch you.”

It uses artificial intelligence to analyze e-mails and can link mails to different accounts, doing what Nucci calls topical analysis. “It’s going to go through a set of documents and automatically it’s going to organize them in topics – I’m not talking about keywords as is done today, I’m talking about topics,” he said.

Writing at Alternet, Christopher Ketcham covers Narus in a broader context,looking at a collection of Israeli-created spy-tech companies now operating in the United States:

By the mid-1990s, Israeli wiretap firms would arrive in the U.S. in a big way.  The key to the kingdom was the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act . . .CALEA mandated that telephonic surveillance operate through computers linked directly into the routers and hubs of telecom companies – a spyware apparatus matched in real-time, all the time, to American telephones and modems.  CALEA effectively made spy equipment an inextricable ligature in telephonic life.  Without CALEA, the NSA in its spectacular surveillance exploits could not have succeeded.

AT&T and Verizon, which together manage as much as 90 percent of the nation’s communications traffic, contracted with Israeli firms in order to comply with CALEA.  AT&T employed the services of Narus Inc., which was founded in Israel in 1997.  It was Narus technology that AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, a 22-year technician with the company, famously unveiled in a 2006 affidavit that described the operations in AT&T’s secret tapping room at its San Francisco facilities.  (Klein’s affidavit formed the gravamen of a lawsuit against AT&T mounted by the Electronic Freedom Foundation, but the lawsuit died when Congress passed the telecom immunity bill last year.)  According to Klein, the Narus supercomputer, the STA 6400, was “known to be used particularly by government intelligence agencies because of its ability to sift through large amounts of data looking for preprogrammed targets.”  The Narus system, which was maintained by Narus technicans, also provided a real-time mirror image of all data streaming through AT&T routers, an image to be rerouted into the computers of the NSA.

According to Jim Bamford, who cites knowledgeable sources, Verizon’s eavesdropping program is run by a competing Israeli firm called Verint, a subsidiary of Comverse Technology, which was founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer in 1984.  Incorporated in New York and Tel Aviv, Comverse is effectively an arm of the Israeli government: 50 percent of its R&D costs are reimbursed by the Israeli Ministry of Industry and Trade.

Marc Perelman’s report on Narus for The Forward included a non-denial denial from Narus.

He begins with a quote from James Bamford, the preeminent American journalist covering the realm of electronic surveillance:

“AT&T have outsourced the bugging of their entire networks — carrying billions of American communications every day — to two mysterious companies with very troubling ties to foreign connections,” he writes. “What is especially troubling, but little known, is that both companies have extensive ties to a foreign country, Israel, as well as links to that country’s intelligence service — a service with a long history of aggressive spying against the U.S.”

He then describes close ties between the Mossad’s Unit 8200, which he describes as the Israeli equivalent of the NSA, and several other Israeli high-tech companies doing business with the United States and other governments.

Bamford also stresses that the founder of Verint systems is wanted in the United States on multiple fraud charges and is a fugitive. The author refers to the Israeli-born Jacob “Kobi” Alexander, the founder of Comverse Technology, Verint’s parent company, who was indicted in 2006 on charges he backdated stock-options. Alexander is fighting American efforts to have him extradited from Namibia.

Both Verint and Narus were founded by Israelis and are now based in the United States. Verint did not respond to requests for comment. Narus lists AT&T as one of its customers on its Web site, along with clients in China, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Narus CEO Greg Oslan told the Forward through spokesperson Kathleen Shanahan that “the only ties Narus has with Israel is that the company was founded in the U.S. by a team that included Israelis.  However, the original founders are no longer with the company.” She stressed that the company sells security, intercept and traffic management solutions to service providers and government organizations to help them protect and manage their complex Internet Protocol networks. “We do not engage in surveillance activities,” she said.

The Israeli embassy in Washington declined to comment.

Read the rest.

Narus was launched with funds supplied by Walden Israel, a venture capital outfit, which provides this listing describing its fiscal progeny:

Narus Inc. provides Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) with a platform for monitoring and metering network traffic. In addition, Narus develops a host of value-added applications that utilize this platform. This enables the ISP’s to offer value-added services to their customers. NARUS is the world’s leading provider of Internet Business Infrastructure (IBI) solutions, which enable IP service providers to grow and achieve profitability. “NARUS” is derived from gnarus, which is Latin for knowledge, and NARUS IBI systems fill the knowledge gap between service provider networks and their businesses.

Curious.

And for more on Narus spookery, here’s a James Bamford interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, a Wired compendium on Narus spookery in the U.S., and a Haaretz report on Ori Cohen, one of the company’s founders.