Secret Surveillance Catalog Leaked
The Wall Street Journal has published a catalog of surveillance tools available to law enforcement and intelligence agencies. The catalog was gathered from attendees of a "secret" surveillance conference near Washington D.C.
The documents are organized by the Journal into 5 categories: Hacking, Intercept, Data Analysis, Web Scraping, and Anonymity. The Hacking section, for example, has marketing material from a company called VUPEN that promises to give law enforcement agencies that contract with them the ability to use previously undiscovered software vulnerabilities to hack into a suspect's computer system.
In the Analysis section, a company called SS8 networks offers social network analysis tools that help create visualizations of connections between people, and not just using social networking data. Email, blogs, and web site information can all be used to generate a visual map of connections between people.
While the companies listed in the documents aren't "secret" companies - most have public web sites - a collection of vendor materials all in one place makes for an interesting overview of potential surveillance capabilities of law enforcement agencies.
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