Kevin at Wired Threat Level Blog posted that an anonymous American carrier maintains a DS-3 line to a mysterious facility in Quantico, Virginia, according to a computer security expert who worked for the company as a contractor in 2003. Customer voice calls, data packets and billing records are all allegedly exposed.DS3 product is designed to handle the most bandwidth-intensive applications. A DS3 (or T3) is a digital communications link that supports data transmission rates of about 43-45Mbps.  Here’s a quote from Kevin’s post: 

“What I thought was alarming is how this carrier ended up essentially allowing a third party outside their organization to have unfettered access to their environment,” Babak Pasdar, CTO of New Jersey-based IGXglobal told Threat Level. “I wanted to put some access controls around it; they vehemently denied it. And when I wanted to put some logging around it, they denied that.”Pasdar won’t name the wireless carrier in question, but his claims are nearly identical to unsourced allegations made in a federal lawsuit filed in 2006 against four phone companies and the U.S. government for alleged privacy violations. That suit names Verizon Wireless as the culprit.  [Wired] 

Technorati Tags: spooks, privacy

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