Interesting articles how the german secret service collected the hard and software for its surveillance: heise.de/ct/artikel/Die-Bayern-Belgien-Connection-284812.html the hardware was bought from the nsa supplier Narus company. https://netzpolitik.org/2013/ard-fakt-bnd-nutzt-dieselbe-uberwachungstechnologie-wie-prism/ but there are indications that parts of the surveillance software was stolen by the agency which almost succeded to sell the stolen software to europol. In the same case the BND is revealed to be involved in one of the largest economic crime scandals in recent history. focus.de/politik/deutschland/geheimdienst-wirtschaftskrimi-beim-bnd_aid_190185.html Long ago, Siemens created a technology called metal, (Machine evaluation and translation of natural language). It was an early sort of a sophisticated language software that could understand entire sentences and translate texts. After Siemens sold the metal language technology, someone bought the rights for the technology and then the a company was founded whose head was a friend of a BND agent callled Bodenkamp. Bodenkamp himself acted as a director for machine translation and artificial intelligence at the authority for foreign questions a BND institute. And here comes a database called polygon, originally created by a small german company as a database system for police officers into play. Metal can do language analysis. It can recognize person names, car numbers, or locations and dates, or phone numbers. And the database polygon is able to save these things together with its meaning. polygon gets after an analysis by metal the subjects and the objects of a sentence, and polygon can relate these with each other. Finally, metal delivers the attribute, and you have the meaning of the sentence. Furthermore, Polygon is able to deliver describing attributes to objects and relations. With that, the information of a sentence can be put in a database, which can be searched. This solution is not only interesting for police officers, but for anyone who has to do with large amounts of text. For europol, the database company that invented polygon should work together with the company responsible for metal in order to create a software for police work. Shortly after the first work with the polygon comany, Bodenkamp created his own company. He bought the polygon workers, stole the sourcecode of polygon and he influenced europol to sign the final contract with his company alone. His error was that he also tried to fake the contract that polygon had for the work that they had already done together with the metal company. Bodenkamp showed them a faked contract that would have forbidden polygon to further develop their code and sell it to others. And that was his final mistake. Also that the Bodenkamp company was listed as a contractor of the european union helped polygon to go to court, but the developers were quick enough to delete the stolen code. Bodenkamp was sentenced because of faking contracts by a german court, which, for the first time in the history of germany searched through the BND headquaters in the process. But the same agent Bodenkamp was not only involved in almost ruining some small german company. The company that developed the metal technology was soon swallowed by the belgish company learnout and hauspie which also invested in language software. Bodenkamp, his real name is Christoph Klonowski, then created several dozens companies, which he called language developent company for separate languages like Farsi Development Company, Slavic Development Company and similar ones for Urdu, Bahassa etc.. These companies then all signed contracts from learnout and hauspie and their translation ans speech software. Their task was to create dictionaries, that the language software could implement a speech to text, text to speech and a translator function for many arabian, african and asian languages. Soon learnout and hauspie was valuable enough to swallow the american language companys Dictaphone and Dragon.... And that was not of the NSAs liking.... Soon journalists noted that the shareholdervalue of learnout and hauspie was an invention, or made up. Learnout and houspie booked the license income from eleven startups in belgia, 19 startups in singapore as 3-8 billion dollar income. Four of the startups noted that they had in july 2000 an income from just 1,5 million dollar. the farsi and turkish startups from bodenkamp just note an income of three million dollar. In the summer 2000, the managers of learnout and hauspie had a crysis meeting. They met at Capri, since Jo Learnout spent his holiday there. Participants were four topmanagers: the two founders, Jo Lernout and Paul Hauspie, the chairman Nico Willaert, and the BND agent Stephan Bodenkamp who at the same time was busy to ruin the german database company polygon. During the meeting, Stephan Bodenkamp told is conversation partners that they have not done sufficient lobby work, and that they did not devote sufficient energy to nurture their contacts in america.... The question is why in the world a BND agent runs to a crysis meeting of learnout and hauspie in order to advise the management?..... At the end learnout and hauspie went bancrupt. With that 6.000 employees had to be fired.... And the BND has lost its attempt to take control over the american market of language software..... Interesting is the answer of the BND boss to polygon at the time where his agent was convicted by a court for faking contracts. BND does not see that any one of its agents has done anything wrong. One may ask as why BND tried to ruin the polygon database company. But well, this company was almost there to get a contract in supplying the systems for europol. By what the BND did here, he succeded in stealing their sourcecode, and then BND almost succeded in replacing this company as a supplier of europol. I guess that since europol is a police organization, it does not immediately share its data with all secret services out there. So if the BND would have turned out to become the software supplier of europol, by backdooring the software, BND would have a very easy way to spy on terrorism suspects. Or they would have been able to insert some fake data, in order to create travel complications for someone.... and so on. I guess they figured that they could not get their spying agreement with the developer of the polygon database. So they tried to replace them.... This story may be old. the german press reported it in the year 2001. heise.de/ct/artikel/Die-Bayern-Belgien-Connection-284812.html But it gives some hint on how the BND bulk surveillance software works. BND managed to get his hands on the language software metal originally developed by siemens. Together with learnout and hauspie, BND developed extensions for arabic and asian languages. In recent files of the NSA provided by Edward Snowden, the NSA highlights several programs of the BND: NSA says that BND is a very modern and capable sigint partner: spiegel.de/media/media-34023.pdf Especially, the NSA is proud of the BNDs translation systems for african languages; spiegel.de/media/media-34117.pdf Thank the BND for providing west african language assistance used by high level officials. assistance used by? that sounds like assistance in form of an automated software program. And just that is what BND agent Bodenkamp provided with their learnout and hauspie translator technique. Then, NSA mentions a software that was capable to use algorithms from social network analysis on phone metadata in order to analyze target groups and other things, looking for information in the flow. spiegel.de/media/media-34117.pdf NSA writes: These tool suites, such as Mira4 integrate database analytic function, In some ways these tools have features that surpass US sigint capabilities. An integrated database analytic function? That sounds much like the program polygon, from which the BND has stolen the sourcecode. The company responsible for polygon has barely survived. Today, they are still selling their software to police departments. Recently, Polygon issued a statement saying: https://netzpolitik.org/2013/ard-fakt-bnd-nutzt-dieselbe-uberwachungstechnologie-wie-prism/ In 2011, BND has officially admitted to have used technology developed by polygon even though the agency never had the rights to use the software. Polygon was never designed or sold for surveillance, but it was stolen by BND with criminal means In a separate blogposting, they say that polygon does not know whether BND is still using their software. The government admitted the use in from 1998 to 2000 and then at last time in 2003 for test cases blog.polygon.de/2013/07/17/in-eigener-sache-fakt-und-die-fakten/3110 I guess once you have stolen the sourcecode, it is easy to make a rewrite, update the code with additional functions and claim it to be your own invention. In her blogpostings, the developer of the Polygon software describes the story how the german secret service had almost ruined their company in more detail: blog.polygon.de/2013/07/26/zweipluszwei_i1/3286 blog.polygon.de/2013/07/26/zweipluszwei_i2/3298 blog.polygon.de/2013/08/04/zweipluszwei_i3/3303 blog.polygon.de/2013/08/05/technologiebeschaffung-nach-art-des-bnd-i-4-die-anfaenge-von-lernouthauspie-und-das-ende-von-metal-bei-siemens/3138 blog.polygon.de/2013/08/06/zweipluszwei_i5/3328 blog.polygon.de/2013/08/12/technologiebeschaffung-nach-art-des-bnd-i-6-was-bodenkamp-und-der-bnd-mit-dem-groessten-boersenbetrugsfall-in-europa-zu-tun-haben/3333 blog.polygon.de/2013/09/01/zweipluszwei_ii1/4098 blog.polygon.de/2013/09/02/zweipluszwei_ii2/4100
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 18:31:20 +0000
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