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Tapped at the source
TECHNOLOGY Insight NSA spying
–No data is safe–
Tapped at the source The NSA is spying on tech firms’ fibre-optic networks – without permission THE US National Security Agency has the transfers take place outside the access to the internal networks of US, approval from a FISA court isn’t Google and Yahoo – and this time even required to tap the information. company executives had no idea they Both Google and Yahoo say they did had been tapped. not cooperate with the NSA. “We have Thanks to documents leaked by not given access to our data centres to former NSA contractor Edward the NSA or to any other government Snowden, we know that tech giants agency,” said a Yahoo spokesperson. including Google, Yahoo, Apple and “We are outraged at the lengths to Facebook cooperate with the NSA’s which the government seems to PRISM scheme, which lets the agency have gone to intercept data from request user data through court our private fibre networks,” Google’s orders under the Foreign Intelligence chief legal officer David Drummond Surveillance Act (FISA). said in a company statement. It now seems the agency’s access “We are outraged at the goes even further. On Wednesday, lengths to which the The Washington Post reported that the NSA is working with its British government seems to have counterpart GCHQ to gain direct access gone to intercept our data” to the optical fibre networks linking Google and Yahoo’s internal data According to the Post, GCHQ gathers centres, under a separate project three to five days of traffic at a time codenamed MUSCULAR. and the NSA uses software filters to Web companies host copies of keep a subset of it – including text, your data on servers around the world, audio and video content, and metadata reducing the chance of losing your on the flow of emails. A top-secret NSA information should one fail. When you document from January reports over log in to an account with these firms, 180 million records had been collected the data sent between you and in 30 days – a volume of data that even their servers is encrypted, making it the agency struggles with. difficult to snoop – but the internal How the data is accessed is unclear. transfers between data centres are “There are ways to get information out unencrypted. And because many of of fibre. If you just bend it a bit, light 22 | NewScientist | 9 November 2013
spills out,” says David Payne of the University of Southampton, UK, who pioneered many of the fibre-optic techniques used today. In fact, fibre networking equipment already contains such taps to let engineers monitor connection quality. Rather than tapping the optical signal, though, Payne says it would be easier to wait until the equipment converts it into an electrical signal that computers can read before patching in. “I don’t think the NSA is surreptitiously digging up a cable and sneaking off some data,” he says. After Snowden’s first leaks, Google announced plans to encrypt its internal communications, and the latest revelations serve to underline why. Yahoo has not yet announced any encryption plans, but it seems to be the only way to protect against snooping. Web firms can’t stop using fibres to coordinate their data centres, as alternative technologies such as microwave links are too expensive or unreliable, says Alan Mauldin of TeleGeography, a telecommunications research firm based in San Diego, California. “You’re not going to see companies moving away from using fibre-optic cables in the near future.” Jacob Aron n
THINK before you swing a punch. That CCTV camera might know what you are doing thanks to a monitoring system that can detect aggressive behaviour. Based on Microsoft’s gaming sensor Kinect, Kintense analyses a person’s body and picks out where the joints are to create a real-time 3D skeleton figure. An algorithm then recognises movements made by this model that indicate aggressive acts such as kicking, pushing, hitting and throwing. Unlike Kinect, Kintense doesn’t require people to be facing the camera. In trials, some actions like kicking were recognised with 90 per cent accuracy, but other movements, like punching and throwing, were trickier to spot. The system, designed by Shahriar Nirjon and colleagues at the University of Virginia, was created to warn medical staff if a patient is acting violently – but it could also be used in security cameras. It was presented at the SenSys conference in Rome, Italy, this week. “Using vision and acoustic sensors originally developed for games is now a very powerful paradigm for many different kinds of applications, including health,” says team member Jack Stankovic. They plan to upgrade the system so it can recognise verbal aggression, too. Rachel Nuwer n
Andrew Testa/Panos
Google/REX Features
Kinect cameras look for kicks and punches
–No data is safe–
Tapped at the source The NSA is spying on tech firms’ fibre-optic networks – without permission THE US National Security Agency has the transfers take place outside the access to the internal networks of US, approval from a FISA court isn’t Google and Yahoo – and this time even required to tap the information. company executives had no idea they Both Google and Yahoo say they did had been tapped. not cooperate with the NSA. “We have Thanks to documents leaked by not given access to our data centres to former NSA contractor Edward the NSA or to any other government Snowden, we know that tech giants agency,” said a Yahoo spokesperson. including Google, Yahoo, Apple and “We are outraged at the lengths to Facebook cooperate with the NSA’s which the government seems to PRISM scheme, which lets the agency have gone to intercept data from request user data through court our private fibre networks,” Google’s orders under the Foreign Intelligence chief legal officer David Drummond Surveillance Act (FISA). said in a company statement. It now seems the agency’s access “We are outraged at the goes even further. On Wednesday, lengths to which the The Washington Post reported that the NSA is working with its British government seems to have counterpart GCHQ to gain direct access gone to intercept our data” to the optical fibre networks linking Google and Yahoo’s internal data According to the Post, GCHQ gathers centres, under a separate project three to five days of traffic at a time codenamed MUSCULAR. and the NSA uses software filters to Web companies host copies of keep a subset of it – including text, your data on servers around the world, audio and video content, and metadata reducing the chance of losing your on the flow of emails. A top-secret NSA information should one fail. When you document from January reports over log in to an account with these firms, 180 million records had been collected the data sent between you and in 30 days – a volume of data that even their servers is encrypted, making it the agency struggles with. difficult to snoop – but the internal How the data is accessed is unclear. transfers between data centres are “There are ways to get information out unencrypted. And because many of of fibre. If you just bend it a bit, light 22 | NewScientist | 9 November 2013
spills out,” says David Payne of the University of Southampton, UK, who pioneered many of the fibre-optic techniques used today. In fact, fibre networking equipment already contains such taps to let engineers monitor connection quality. Rather than tapping the optical signal, though, Payne says it would be easier to wait until the equipment converts it into an electrical signal that computers can read before patching in. “I don’t think the NSA is surreptitiously digging up a cable and sneaking off some data,” he says. After Snowden’s first leaks, Google announced plans to encrypt its internal communications, and the latest revelations serve to underline why. Yahoo has not yet announced any encryption plans, but it seems to be the only way to protect against snooping. Web firms can’t stop using fibres to coordinate their data centres, as alternative technologies such as microwave links are too expensive or unreliable, says Alan Mauldin of TeleGeography, a telecommunications research firm based in San Diego, California. “You’re not going to see companies moving away from using fibre-optic cables in the near future.” Jacob Aron n
THINK before you swing a punch. That CCTV camera might know what you are doing thanks to a monitoring system that can detect aggressive behaviour. Based on Microsoft’s gaming sensor Kinect, Kintense analyses a person’s body and picks out where the joints are to create a real-time 3D skeleton figure. An algorithm then recognises movements made by this model that indicate aggressive acts such as kicking, pushing, hitting and throwing. Unlike Kinect, Kintense doesn’t require people to be facing the camera. In trials, some actions like kicking were recognised with 90 per cent accuracy, but other movements, like punching and throwing, were trickier to spot. The system, designed by Shahriar Nirjon and colleagues at the University of Virginia, was created to warn medical staff if a patient is acting violently – but it could also be used in security cameras. It was presented at the SenSys conference in Rome, Italy, this week. “Using vision and acoustic sensors originally developed for games is now a very powerful paradigm for many different kinds of applications, including health,” says team member Jack Stankovic. They plan to upgrade the system so it can recognise verbal aggression, too. Rachel Nuwer n
Andrew Testa/Panos
Google/REX Features
Kinect cameras look for kicks and punches