Follow-up: The time has finally come…
The basis for my short, sweet, and to-the-point The time has finally come… post – Short Cuts by Daniel Soar – has made it to cnet news for an “exclusive” review of ThorpeGlen‘s telecommunications data analysis and extraction offerings.
With the passage of laws like the FISA Amendments Act and the USA Patriot Act, in most cases, requests for customer information come with a gag order, forbidding the companies from notifying the public, or the end users whose calling information is being snooped upon. Gidari summed it up this way:
So any entity–from tower provider, to a third-party spam filter, to WAP gateway operator to billing to call center customer service–can get legal process and be compelled to assist in silence. They likely don’t volunteer because of reputation and contractual obligations, but they won’t resist either.
- Exclusive: Widespread cell phone location snooping by NSA?
at news.cnet.com
The article includes a link to a demonstration PDF which has since been removed from the ThorpeGlen website.
Here is a glimpse of what was removed:
Fortunately, there’s a mirror of the PDF – unfortunately, ThorpeGlen requested that this document be edited to obscure the following information:
Don’t wait – act now! Vincent is waiting to hear from you! (He prefers to be called “Vinnie”, though, and he will likely be changing his mobile number soon)
Interestingly enough, ThorpeGlen’s site is demonstrating some ASP.net errors (unhandled exceptions are a common indicator of inexperienced developers – displaying unhandled exceptions is a common indicator of lax security and incompetent administrators). Anyone familiar with IIS?
Visit the ThorpeGlen website at:
http://www.thorpeglen.com/TemplateFrontview.aspx?sec_id=1001
to find out more about ThorpeGlen’s inimitable security!
It is reassuring to know that a company which aggregates sensitive information takes the time to secure its own servers.
