FBI is at it again

Sat Oct 27 21:54:39 UTC 2001

On Fri, 26 Oct 2001, Larry Diffey wrote:

:Per the following article: <SNIP> it appears as if the FBI now wants to 
:route ALL Internet traffic through it's central servers!!!!
:
:I'm gonna stop before I say something that will get me arrested.

Or mocked mercilessly. :P

I'm willing to bet that it's not an issue of routing all traffic, but
the ability to route any traffic. Far be it from me to speculate 
wildly, but I think this screams CenterTrack.  

I say the FBI just wants the ability to pick routes
an transit them transparently through their network for sniffage. This
could be done easily with existing technology (GRE tunnels, MPLS VPN, 
and others) 

It would be substantially cheaper to have a vpn that passed through 
the FBI's  AS, whereby they can arbitrarily tell a remote router 
to route a prefix through their tunnel interface, which goes to fedland, 
gets looped back to the original router, which also starts advertising
the prefix via the other fbi tunnel interface. 

It's pretty straight forward technically, and almost impossible to
detect from layer 3 from the users perspective. It's also way 
cheaper than a $5-10k PC that requires staff with clearances to 
operate or even be in the same room with. 

I would imagine that with the new legislation being passed, you won't
so much see g-men with carnivores knocking on your door, but a new
configuration requirement for a particular tier of network provider. 

Just a guess tho. 

;) 

--
batz
Reluctant Ninja
Defective Technologies