[Cryptography] "Spy Agencies Urge Caution on Phone Deal"

[Jerry Leichter]

Not directly crypto-related, but an example of the tangle of relationships that drive surveillance:  http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/us/spy-agencies-urge-caution-on-phone-deal.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all reports on a backstage argument going on in Washington about a special network/database - oddly never named in the article - that "rout[es] millions of phone calls and text messages in the United States".  Apparently this was a system created back in the late 1990's to implement number portability.  It's not clear from the article whether it's a database of number-to-carrier mappings, or actually routes call based on such a database.

A small Virginia company named Neustar created the system and has managed it ever since.  Recently, the major carriers recommended to the FCC that Neustar be replaced by Telcordia, an American subsidiary of Ericsson, which allegedly can do the job more cheaply.  The "intelligence community" has been pushed to leave the job in Neustar's hands, claiming that letting a European company run the system would leak important information about how US surveillance of the phone networks is implemented.

Neustar, obviously no stranger to the Washington inside game, has hired good ol' Michael Chertoff to represent them.

The bullshit and inside baseball and lobbying here runs so deep you can't see bottom.  And underneath it all, another piece of the vast tapping network we've built in the US in the last 12 or so years is revealed, just a little bit.

                                                        -- Jerry