So, who is the company at the heart of the NSA domestic spy scandals? What do we really know about them? What does their name mean for starters? Well, Narus comes from the Latin word “gnarus,” which means “all knowing”. From their website we find their version as to what they do,
With its patented technology and processes, Narus helps customers like AT&T, Brasil Telecom, Korea Telecom, KDDI, Telecom Egypt, Saudi Telecom, France Telecom and T-Mobile in areas of network security, traffic classification and monitoring.
To add to this list is the Chinese government. This was the story that first brought Narus to my attention. Shanghai Telecom had placed an order with Narus for technology to monitor VoIP phone calls. This started my poking around. Soon on the heels of this article came the revelation that AT&T had been permitting the NSA to tap into it’s trunks to monitor phone and internet traffic, with Narus technology. A few days later we find that Yahoo and Microsoft are looking to purchase land for data centers just down the road from the NSA’s Yakima listening post. The EFF decided to take AT&T to court by filing a class-action lawsuit collaboration with illegal domestic spying program. This is a program that is linked to the Bush White House. Looking back to January we find Bush defending the domestic spy program. Now, with the lawsuit filed we find the Bush White House moving to intervene and block the lawsuit on behalf of AT&T. Here is a link to their full statement of interest in the case.
So, back to the company. This company was founded by Ori Cohen, an Israeli immigrant, who created his software while he was working at VDOnet. Cohen discovered that ISPs were reluctant to roll out video streaming as they had no way to bill customers. Hmmm, an interesting back story.
Cohen saw an opportunity, and he left to start Narus about 3 years ago. The company has labored in anonymity for almost two and a half years, even though it has raised $30 million in two rounds from investors such as the Mayfield Fund, Chase Capital and Walden Ventures. The end result of all those efforts is a software called Semantic Traffic Analysis (STA), which runs on powerful Sun sunw (nasdaq: sunw) workstations, operating like a web probe that is hooked straight into the network.
Sounds reminiscent of the Carnivore program or the Joint Intrusion Detection System (JIDS). Now, in the weeks following 9/11 Cheney pushed to widen the eavesdropping of domestic phone calls. The NSA protested the legality of Cheney’s request and were able to hold out, for a time.
The N.S.A.’s position ultimately prevailed. But just how Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the agency at the time, designed the program, persuaded wary N.S.A. officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits is not yet clear.
We found that the US government, through the NSA, had requested ISPs provide access to their data. Most agreed but, Qwest broke ranks with the crowd.
“When he learned that no such authority had been granted and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process, including the Special Court which had been established to handle such matters, Mr. Nacchio concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommications Act,” Nacchio’s attorney wrote in a statement.
The path to knowing any private company is through their finances. We have seen that they have JP Morgan, Mayfield, NeoCarta, Walden International and Intel as investors. To dig into this further would be to check their SEC filings. And one can’t help but raise an eyebrow at the appointment of former deputy director of the NSA, William P. Crowell to its board of directors.
So, what of the technology?
* Universal data collection from links, routers, soft switches, IDS/IPS, databases, etc. provides total network vew across the world’s largest IP networks.
* Normalization, Correlation, Aggregation and Analysis provide a comprehensive and detailed model of user, element, protocol, application and network behaviors, in real time.
* Seven 9s reliability from data collection to data processing and analysis.
* Industry-leading packet processing performance that supports network speeds of up to OC-192 at layer 4 and OC-48 at layer 7, enabling carriers to monitor traffic at either the edge of the network or at the core.
* Unsurpassed and limitless scalability to support the world’s largest, most complex IP networks.
* Unparalleled flexibility — NarusInsight’s functionality can easily be configured to meet any specific customer requirement (Narus Software Developer Kit –SDK).
* Unparalleled extensibility — NarusInsight’s functionality can easily be configured to feed a particular activity or IP service such as security, lawful intercept or even Skype detection and blocking.
We will follow this…
UPDATE: Department of Justice files a motion to dismiss the EFF lawsuit today (May 13, 2006).
[tags]Narus, NSA, EFF, Ori Cohen, Domestic spying, illegal wiretapping, Bush, DOJ[/tags]