Earlier today we found out that the EFF had sued AT&T over their secret work with the NSA on surveillance of millions of US citizens without wiretaps. We learned that paragraph 65 of this complaint shows EFF is trying to turn it into a nationwide Class Action suit covering all current and former customers (any after 9/2001) of AT&T. And we learned that a retired AT&T technician had stepped forward and disclosed the installation of secret NSA spy equipment in the San Francisco trunk facility. As well as the belief that similar equipment is in place in Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.

Specifically, this equipment was the Narus ST-6400, a machine that was capable of monitoring over 622 Mbits/second in real time in May, 2000, and capturing anything that hits its' semantice (i.e. the meaning of the content) triggers. The latest generation is called NarusInsight, capable of monitoring 10 billion bits of data per second.

And what does it monitor while looking at this 10 billion bits of IP data per second? First lets take a look at what the network model is, the OSI model of seven layers. NarusInsight focuses on two layers: number four, the transport layer, built on standards like TCP and UDP, the physical building blocks of internet data traffic, and number seven, the application layer, built on standards like HTTP and FTP, which are dependent on the application using them, i.e. Internet Explorer, Kazaa, Skype, etc. It monitors 10 billion bits per second at level four and 2500 million bits per second at level seven. For reference, the 256K DSL line I am using equals .24 million bits per second. So one NarusInsight machine can look at 10,000 million DSL lines at once in great detail. That is a pretty damn big number. This is some really serious hardware with equally serious software.