Today, with the highly increasing intelligence budgets and technology, hackers and intelligence services have tools which allow them to tap the Internet selectively for strategic, competitive and confidential information.

Some well known examples from the intelligence services include Echelon, Carnivore, Magic Lantern and Tias among others.

You will find a short description of each and some interesting links below:

• Echelon
  • Echelon is an initiative to gain listening access to all communications worldwide by the US government, with a yearly budget of 10 billion US dollars.
  • Description in the IT Security Dictionary
  • The Echelon site (anonymizer access to "Echelon Watch") gives the newest links to Echelon's stories from the civil liberty organization.
  • Use of Echelon for economic intelligence helping US companies to win contracts on the very comprehensive Telepolis pages of Heise Online, listing newest articles of initiative of other governments as well
  • Article (in Deutsch) about Echelon and its history becoming of public knowledge show that the project started in 1988.
  • Article (in Deutsch) about Echelon of 10.5.1999 in c't
  • Backgrounder (in Deutsch) of the Technical University Berlin (including pictures)
  • Search google on "Echelon"
• Carnivore
  • Carnivore is an initiative from the US FBI (here is the anonymizer access to the FBI's budget for 2003) to get access to E-mails over the Internet.
  • Official description of the US FBI (anonymizer access)
  • Description in the IT Security Dictionary and also in the How it Works site:
    
  • Description of the Carnivore Diagnostic tool from the FBI's web site (anonymizer access to FBI site at http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress00/kerr090600.htm )
  • Statement of the FBI on July 24, 2000 about Carnivore (anonymizer access to FBI site at: http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress00/kerr072400.htm )
  • Search google on "Carnivore"
• Magic Lantern
  • Magic Lantern is an extension of Carnivore consisting of computer viruses sent to computers to capture the typing, passwords and other user data.
  • Description in the IT Security Dictionary
  • Description by MNSBC and by the Washington Post (here also described in French)
  • Article in "Wired" on Magic Lantern and secret agreements between US companies and US government
  • Article (in Deutsch) about Magic Lantern in Telepolis pages of Heise Online
  • Search google on "Magic Lantern"
• Tias (John Poindexter's initiative)
  • This 200 million US Dollars per year initiative is also to gain total data control worldwide by 2005, by building up a giant database and data-mining tool.
  • Total Information Awareness System (Tias) is issued from the Information Awareness Office (IAO) of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) of the US Defense Ministry. It is led by John Poindexter.
  • The Genoa project is the data-mining tool development based on neural networks.
  • Darpa's own information (anonymizer access)
  • Article in "Wired"
  • Excellent Big Title Article (en Français) on pages 1 and 3 in "24 heures" of 23.12.2002
  • Article (in Deutsch) from c't Spezial (11.11.2002)
  • News (in Deutsch) from c't (12.11.2002)
  • Search google on "Total Information Awareness System"
• The CIA's venture capital firm
  • The CIA has founded a venture capital firm In-Q-Tel (anonymizer access) to support US companies and their access to confidential data
  • Article (in Deutsch) from Heise Online (17.11.2002)

These are only some of the publicly known projects, while a lot of others are kept secret.

Quite a lot of hacker tools are also available (they are not listed here for obvious reasons). But you can search google on "internet hacking tools" to get an idea on the variety of tools available.

Also, concerning the most commonly used (and favored by the US government) encryption algorithms, there is a lot of doubt on their robustness:

• DES: The Electronic Frontier Foundation cracked DES in 1999 ...
• AES (yes, the newest Rijandel algorithm selected by the US government): Crypto-gram in its Edition of September 15, 2002 reported that attacks maybe lowering AES robustness.

A better algorithm, known for the past 10 years, and still reputed for its robustness and security is IDEA™, the International Data Encryption Algorithm:

• IDEA: It's description is public at the commercial entity MediaCrypt who is handling its patent.
• Bruce Schneier, the reputed cryptoanalyst, stated in his book Applied Cryptography, in 1996 that "In my opinion, IDEA is the best and most secure block algorithm available to the public at this time" (his opinion has not changed since then).
• Interestingly, IDEA is not only the most secure algorithm at this time, but also the fastest one. A comparative study of MediaCrypt shows this.

Most encryption and VPN devices on the market do not provide an adequate level of protection, only using DES and triple-DES.

Lightning uses state of the art technology, and gives the choice of the encryption algorithms to the user. The standard ones include IDEA, CAST, Blowfish, Twofish, AES, DES and 3DES to provide the needed level of transmission security for the user's (and his clients') sensitive and valuable data.

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Why Lightning's firewalls and VPN gateways are recommended and used by banks and other security conscious customers