The Data Intercept Technology Unit (DITU, pronounced DEE-too) is a unit of the

Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and Federal law enforcement in the United States, its principal federal law enforcement ag ...

(FBI) of the United States, which is responsible for intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages of terrorists and foreign intelligence targets inside the US. It is not known when DITU was established, but the unit already existed in 1997. DITU is part of the FBI's Operational Technology Division (OTD), which is responsible for all technical intelligence collection, and is located at

Marine Corps Base Quantico Marine Corps Base Quantico (commonly abbreviated MCB Quantico) is a United States Marine Corps installation located near Triangle, Virginia, covering nearly of southern Prince William County, Virginia, northern Stafford County, and southe ...

in Virginia, which is also the home of the FBI's training academy. OTD had organized its activities into seven regions.

Internet wiretapping

Interception at Internet service providers

In the late 1990s, DITU managed an FBI program codenamed Omnivore, which was established in 1997. This program was able to capture the e-mail messages of a specific target from the e-mail traffic that travelled through the network of an

Internet service provider An Internet service provider (ISP) is an organization that provides a myriad of services related to accessing, using, managing, or participating in the Internet. ISPs can be organized in various forms, such as commercial, community-owned, no ...

(ISP). The e-mail that was filtered out could be saved on a tape-backup drive or printed in real-time. In 1999, Omnivore was replaced by three new tools from the DragonWare Suite: Carnivore, Packeteer and CoolMiner.Shane Harris
"Meet the Spies Doing the NSA's Dirty Work"
''Foreign Policy'', November 21, 2013

Carnivore A carnivore , or meat-eater (Latin, ''caro'', genitive ''carnis'', meaning meat or "flesh" and ''vorare'' meaning "to devour"), is an animal or plant Plants are the eukaryotes that form the Kingdom (biology), kingdom Plantae; they ar ...

consisted of Microsoft workstations with packet-sniffing software which were physically installed at an

(ISP) or other location where it can "sniff" traffic on a LAN segment to look for email messages in transit. Between 1998 and 2000 Carnivore was used about 25 times. By 2005, Carnivore had been replaced by commercial software such as NarusInsight. A report in 2007 described this successor system as being located "inside an Internet provider's network at the junction point of a router or network switch" and capable of indiscriminately storing data flowing through the provider's network. The raw data collected by these systems are decoded and put together by a tool called Packeteer and these can be viewed by using a custom made software interface called CoolMiner. FBI field offices have CoolMiner workstations that can access the collected data which are stored at the Storage Area Network (SAN) of one of the seven DITU regions. In August 2013, CNet reported that DITU helped developing custom "port reader" software that enables the FBI to collect metadata from internet traffic in real time. This software copies the internet communications as they flow through a network and then extracts only the requested metadata. The CNet report says that the FBI is quietly pressing telecom carriers and Internet service providers to install this software onto their networks, so it can be used in cases where the carriers' own lawful interception equipment cannot fully provide the data the Bureau is looking for.Declan McCullagh
"FBI pressures Internet providers to install surveillance software"
CNet, August 2, 2013 According to the FBI, the Patriot Act from 2001 authorizes the collection of internet metadata without a specific warrant, but it can also be done with a

pen register A pen register, or dialed number recorder (DNR), is a device that records all numbers called from a particular telephone line. The term has come to include any device or program that performs similar functions to an original pen register, includin ...

and trap and trace order, for which it is only required that the results will likely be "relevant" to an investigation. A specific warrant is needed though for the interception of the content of internet communications (like e-mail bodies, chat messages and streaming voice and video) both for criminal investigations and for those under the

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA, , ) is a Law of the United States, United States federal law that establishes procedures for the surveillance and collection of foreign intelligence on domestic soil.

Assisting NSA collection

Since the NSA set up the

PRISM PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies. The program is also known by the SIGAD . PRISM collects stored internet ...

program in 2007, it is DITU that actually picks up the data at the various internet companies, like

Facebook Facebook is a social media and social networking service owned by the American technology conglomerate Meta Platforms, Meta. Created in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg with four other Harvard College students and roommates, Eduardo Saverin, Andre ...

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

and

Yahoo Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, an ...

, before passing them on to the NSA for further processing, analysing and storing. DITU also works closely with the three biggest American telecommunications providers (AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint) to "ensure its ability to intercept the telephone and Internet communications of its domestic targets, as well as the NSA's ability to intercept electronic communications transiting through the United States on fiber-optic cables". The latter is probably related to the NSA's collection of domestic telephony metadata, for which the FBI petitioned the

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court The United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), also called the FISA Court, is a U.S. federal court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) to oversee requests for surveillance warrants ag ...

to order the biggest American telecommunication carriers, like for example

Verizon Business Network Services Verizon Communications Inc. ( ), is an American telecommunications company headquartered in New York City. It is the world's second-largest telecommunications company by revenue and its mobile network is the largest wireless carrier in the ...

, to hand over all the call records of their customers to the NSA. An NSA document disclosed by the Snowden leaks gives the example of DITU "working with Microsoft to understand an additional feature in Outlook.com which allows users to create email aliases, which may affect our tasking processes."Glenn Greenwald, Ewen MacAskill, Laura Poitras, Spencer Ackerman, and Dominic Rushe
"Microsoft handed the NSA access to encrypted messages"
''The Guardian'', July 12, 2013

External links

Meet the Spies Doing the NSA's Dirty Work

Internet Wiretapping - Government and Law Enforcement Use

References

{{FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation Mass surveillance

Internet wiretapping

Interception at Internet service providers

Assisting NSA collection

See also

External links

References