Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert
Authors: Ronald J. Deibert
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eventually led to a class action lawsuit by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) against AT&T, alleging that the company had colluded with the National Security Agency (NSA) outside of the rule of law. As it turned out, inside room 641A was a data-mining operation involving a piece of equipment called Narus STA 6400, known to be used by the NSA to sift through large streams of data. The choice of location was significant. Because of the complex routing arrangements that govern the flow of traffic through cyberspace, many smaller ISPs sublease their traffic through AT&T – a globe-spanning “Tier 1” telecommunications company – and a large proportion of global communications traffic flows through its pipes. The AT&T-operated IXP in San Francisco is one of the world’s most important chokepoints for Internet communications.
The IXP is a chokepoint for not only international traffic; it handles a large volume of domestic U.S. communications as well.The NSA is prohibited from collecting communications from American citizens, and the data-mining operation at the AT&T facility strongly suggested that prohibition was being ignored. The EFF class action lawsuit took AT&T and another IXP operator, Verizon, to task for their complicity with what turned out to be a presidential directive instructing the NSA to install the equipment at key IXPS in order to monitor the communications of American citizens. In 2008, as the lawsuit dragged on, the Bush administration took pre-emptive action by introducing a controversial amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Services Act (FISA), giving telecommunications companies retroactive immunity from prosecution if the attorney general certified that surveillance did not occur, was legal, or was authorized by the president. This certification was filed in September of 2008 and shortly thereafter, the EFF’S case was dismissed by a federal judge citing the immunity amendment. (Presidential candidate Barack Obama surprised many of his supporters by backing the FISA Amendment Act, and his administration has vigorously blocked court challenges against it ever since.) Although the full scope of the NSA’S warrantless wiretapping program (code-named “Stellar Wind”) is classified, William Binney, a former NSA employee who left the agency in protest, estimates that up to 1.5 billion phone calls, as well as voluminous flows of email and other electronic data, are processed every day by the eavesdropping system stumbled upon by Klein.
IXmaps, a research project at the University of Toronto, raises awareness about the surveillance risks of IXPS, particularly for Canadians. The project uses trace-routing technology to determine the routes discrete bits of information (or “packets”) take to reach their destination over the Internet. In one example, IXmaps detailed the route of an email destined for the Hockey Hall of Fame in downtown Toronto and originating at the University of Toronto a few miles away. The email crossed into the UnitedStates, was peered at an IXP in Chicago, and was probably exposed to one of the NSA’S warrantless surveillance systems rumoured to be located at the facility. Known as boomerang traffic, this type of cross-border routing is a function of the fact that there are eighty-five IXPS in the U.S., but only five in Canada. Routing arrangements made by Canadian ISPs and telecommunications companies will routinely pass traffic into the U.S. and back into Canada to save on peering costs, subjecting otherwise internal Canadian communications to extraterritorial monitoring.
• • •
One of the long-standing myths about cyberspace is that it is highly resilient to disruption. For those of us who have laboured over Internet downtimes, email failures, or laptop crashes, this may seem like a fanciful idea. But the resiliency of cyberspace does have some basis in the original design principles of the Internet, whose architecture was constructed to route information
The IXP is a chokepoint for not only international traffic; it handles a large volume of domestic U.S. communications as well.The NSA is prohibited from collecting communications from American citizens, and the data-mining operation at the AT&T facility strongly suggested that prohibition was being ignored. The EFF class action lawsuit took AT&T and another IXP operator, Verizon, to task for their complicity with what turned out to be a presidential directive instructing the NSA to install the equipment at key IXPS in order to monitor the communications of American citizens. In 2008, as the lawsuit dragged on, the Bush administration took pre-emptive action by introducing a controversial amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Services Act (FISA), giving telecommunications companies retroactive immunity from prosecution if the attorney general certified that surveillance did not occur, was legal, or was authorized by the president. This certification was filed in September of 2008 and shortly thereafter, the EFF’S case was dismissed by a federal judge citing the immunity amendment. (Presidential candidate Barack Obama surprised many of his supporters by backing the FISA Amendment Act, and his administration has vigorously blocked court challenges against it ever since.) Although the full scope of the NSA’S warrantless wiretapping program (code-named “Stellar Wind”) is classified, William Binney, a former NSA employee who left the agency in protest, estimates that up to 1.5 billion phone calls, as well as voluminous flows of email and other electronic data, are processed every day by the eavesdropping system stumbled upon by Klein.
IXmaps, a research project at the University of Toronto, raises awareness about the surveillance risks of IXPS, particularly for Canadians. The project uses trace-routing technology to determine the routes discrete bits of information (or “packets”) take to reach their destination over the Internet. In one example, IXmaps detailed the route of an email destined for the Hockey Hall of Fame in downtown Toronto and originating at the University of Toronto a few miles away. The email crossed into the UnitedStates, was peered at an IXP in Chicago, and was probably exposed to one of the NSA’S warrantless surveillance systems rumoured to be located at the facility. Known as boomerang traffic, this type of cross-border routing is a function of the fact that there are eighty-five IXPS in the U.S., but only five in Canada. Routing arrangements made by Canadian ISPs and telecommunications companies will routinely pass traffic into the U.S. and back into Canada to save on peering costs, subjecting otherwise internal Canadian communications to extraterritorial monitoring.
• • •
One of the long-standing myths about cyberspace is that it is highly resilient to disruption. For those of us who have laboured over Internet downtimes, email failures, or laptop crashes, this may seem like a fanciful idea. But the resiliency of cyberspace does have some basis in the original design principles of the Internet, whose architecture was constructed to route information
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