‘What Is That Box?’ — When The NSA Shows Up At Your Internet Company
July 22nd, 2013Via: Buzzfeed:
They came in and showed me papers. It was a court order from the FISC (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court) for the intercept, with the agent’s name… and the court’s information. I think it was three or four pages of text. They wouldn’t let met me copy them. They let me take notes in regards to technical aspects of what they wanted to do.
We had to facilitate them to set up a duplicate port to tap in to monitor that customer’s traffic. It was a 2U (two-unit) PC that we ran a mirrored ethernet port to.
[What we ended up with was] a little box in our systems room that was capturing all the traffic to this customer. Everything they were sending and receiving.
…
There was discussion [amongst employees] asking, “What is that box?”
I said, “It is something I am dealing with,” and usually that was where it ended.
I didn’t facilitate the install at the time; another engineer, who no longer works for me, did. I’m not sure it had any access to the internet, so they could manage it remotely, but if they requested that, we would have facilitated them. I’m sure it was just capturing the entire stream to hard disk for later analysis. After the initial install, they didn’t come in again until it was removed.
