Unravelling TrapWire: The CIA-Connected Global Suspicious Activity Surveillance System

August 11th, 2012

Via: Public Intelligence:

Hacked emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor have shed light on a global suspicious activity surveillance system called TrapWire that is reportedly in use in locations around the world from the London Stock Exchange to the White House. The emails, which were released yesterday by WikiLeaks, provide information on the extent and operations of a system designed to correlate suspicious activity reports and other evidence that may indicate surveillance connected with a potential terrorist attack.

A proprietary white paper produced by TrapWire, formerly called Abraxas Applications, describes the product as “a unique, predictive software system designed to detect patterns of pre-attack surveillance.” In an interview from 2005 with the Northern Virginia Technology Council, the CEO of Abraxas Corporation Richard “Hollis” Helms says the goal of TrapWire is to “collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists.” Fred Burton, the CEO of Stratfor, describes Trapwire in an email from November 2009 as “a technology solution predicated upon behavior patterns in red zones to identify surveillance. It helps you connect the dots over time and distance.”

Documents submitted with Abraxas’ initial trademarking of TrapWire, describe the system as utilizing “a facility’s existing technologies (such as pan-tilt-zoom [PTZ] cameras) and humans (security personnel, employees, and neighbors)” to collect data which is then “recorded and stored in a standardized format to facilitate data mining, information comparison and information sharing across the network.” TrapWire “standardizes descriptions of potential surveillance activity, such as photographing, measuring and signaling” and then shares “threat information” across the network to track potential correlations across other locations on the network.

One thing that makes TrapWire a particularly interesting company is that its president, chief of operations and director of business development are all former employees of the Central Intelligence Agency.

One Response to “Unravelling TrapWire: The CIA-Connected Global Suspicious Activity Surveillance System”

  1. LoneWolf says:

    John Young has a pdf on his site:

    http://cryptome.org/isp-spy/abraxas-spy.pdf

    The 2008 document describes the TrapWire architecture (No telling how advanced it has become now 4 years later) At the time, they claim no personal information is mixed into the database record.

    Notice

    AA is a risk mitigation technology and services company that designs, builds and markets software products intended to prevent terrorist and other criminal attacks directed against critical nfrastructure, key assets and personnel. Our flagship product, TrapWire, has been designed to provide a simple yet powerful means of collecting and recording suspicious activity reports. Once a suspicious activity in entered into the system it is analyzed and compared with data entered from other areas within a network for the purpose of identifying patterns of behavior that are indicative of preattack planning.

    Security

    The data center housing the TrapWire infrastructure was constructed to the highest level of physical security standards. Access to the facility is controlled and logged through a system of biometric hand geometry readers, and the facility is carefully monitored by security officials on guard 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 a year.

    System Security is also of critical importance and is designed into all levels of the TrapWire application and infrastructure. All connections to the TrapWire application are made through a 128-bit encrypted SSL connection which
    terminates in a network DMZ. User authentication is performed from the DMZ and must be successful before a connection to TrapWire is permitted.
    Implemented security processes are intended to protect any information in the TrapWire system from loss, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration or destruction.

    btw … Public searches for the words Abraxas or TrapWire on the Austin, TX based Strafor company website yields nothing. Wonder if owning an expensive subscription with the company would allow this intel?

    http://www.stratfor.com/search/

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