Whistleblower says Feds have highspeed backdoor into major US wireless carrier's network

Snip from post by Kevin Poulsen, at Wired Threat Level blog.

A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems, exposing customers' voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance, according to a computer security consultant who says he worked for the carrier in late 2003.

"What I thought was alarming is how this carrier ended up essentially allowing a third party outside their organization to have unfettered access to their environment," Babak Pasdar, CTO of New Jersey-based IGXglobal told Threat Level. "I wanted to put some access controls around it; they vehemently denied it. And when I wanted to put some logging around it, they denied that."

Pasdar won't name the wireless carrier in question, but his claims are nearly identical to unsourced allegations made in a federal lawsuit filed in 2006 against four phone companies and the U.S. government for alleged privacy violations. That suit names Verizon Wireless as the culprit.

Wired contacted Verizon, and a company spokesperson declined to comment:

"What you're talking about sounds as if it would be classified and involving national security, so I wouldn't be able to find out the facts."

Link to full post, with related documents.

Update: A BB commenter points to a related Slashdot thread. Snip:

It's very likely this is to meet the realtime reporting/relay requirements of the CALEA statue which governs lawful intercept of voice and data communications.

Link