Over on Dave Farber’s IP List, John Bartas pointed to a blog entry on Wired about AT&T and the NSA wiretapping controversy. The entry begins: “It’s not surprising that an expert hired by EFF should produce an analysis that supports the group’s case against AT&T. But last week’s public court filing of a redacted statement by J. Scott Marcus is still worth reading for the obvious expertise of its author, and the cunning insights he draws from the AT&T spy documents.” There’s a great summary of the reasons to believe that:
- “The AT&T documents are authentic.
- There may be dozens of surveillance rooms in AT&T offices around the country.
- The internet surveillance program covers domestic traffic, not just international traffic.
- The system is capable of looking at content, not just addresses.”
But as John Bartas wrote on IP, “The best part is at the end. Good old traceroute!”:
… “With that in mind, here’s the 27B Stroke 6 guide to detecting if your traffic is being funneled into the secret room on San Francisco’s Folsom street.
If you’re a Windows user, fire up an MS-DOS command prompt. Now type tracert followed by the domain name of the website, e-mail host, VoIP switch, or whatever destination you’re interested in. Watch as the program spits out your route, line by line.
C:> tracert nsa.gov
1 2 ms 2 ms 2 ms 12.110.110.204
[…]
7 11 ms 14 ms 10 ms as-0-0.bbr2.SanJose1.Level3.net [64.159.0.218]
8 13 12 19 ms ae-23-56.car3.SanJose1.Level3.net [4.68.123.173]
9 18 ms 16 ms 16 ms 192.205.33.17
10 88 ms 92 ms 91 ms tbr2-p012201.sffca.ip.att.net [12.123.13.186]
11 88 ms 90 ms 88 ms tbr1-cl2.sl9mo.ip.att.net [12.122.10.41]
12 89 ms 97 ms 89 ms tbr1-cl4.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.122.10.29]
13 89 ms 88 ms 88 ms ar2-a3120s6.wswdc.ip.att.net [12.123.8.65]
14 102 ms 93 ms 112 ms 12.127.209.214
15 94 ms 94 ms 93 ms 12.110.110.13
16 * * *
17 * * *
18 * *In the above example, my traffic is jumping from Level 3 Communications to AT&T’s network in San Francisco, presumably over the OC-48 circuit that AT&T tapped on February 20th, 2003, according to the Klein docs. The magic string you’re looking for is sffca.ip.att.net. If it’s present immediately above or below a non-att.net entry, then — by Klein’s allegations — your packets are being copied into room 641A, and from there, illegally, to the NSA. Of course, if Marcus is correct and AT&T has installed these secret rooms all around the country, then any att.net entry in your route is a bad sign.