5 January 2002
Cryptome welcomes more information on the "Watson" intelligence analysis and unidentified surveillance systems; send to jya@pipeline.com. A likely Watson candidate is described below; more information welcome on the surveillance and interception systems.
Curious which Watson the system is named for, IBM's Thomas Watson, Alexander Graham Bell's laboratory assistant, "Come here, Watson, I need you," Sherlock Holmes' assistant Watson, or some other.
From: "sento"
To: "IntelForum" <intelforum@his.com>
Subject: Croatia Using US-Installed Intelligence Technology
Date: Fri, 4 Jan 2002 17:42:16 -0500
EUP20020103000294
3 January 2002
Belgrade Glas Javnosti (in Serbo-Croatian), p. 4
[Unattributed report: "Croatia Spies on Mobile Phones Throughout Balkans"]
The world's most advanced Watson system for analyzing intelligence data and advanced US equipment for listening in on digital communication have lately been installed in Croatia. The Croatian intelligence service received the Watson system and surveillance equipment from the United States for use in the fight against terrorism and illegal migration. The equipment and installations have been mounted in all major Croatian towns.
After [Croatia's 1995] Operation Storm, dissatisfied that surveillance equipment was being used for internal political purposes, the United States started gradually pulling out their equipment and personnel, so that for a time Croatia was in a total information blackout. However, the [11 September] terrorist attacks on the United States changed all this.
Surveillance equipment received by Croatia in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States also effectively covers the territories of the neighboring countries: tabs are being kept on telephone conversations and other forms of communication (electronic mail, fax messages) being conducted by way of all kinds of digital and analog communication equipment, especially mobile phones.
The equipping of Croatia with hi-tech espionage installations shows that the United States today regards that country as the region's foremost partner of the antiterrorist coalition. This is also recognition of Croatia's long years of cooperation in the exchange of intelligence data with the US intelligence service. This is especially true in the case of exchanging intelligence on the presence of terrorist groups and individuals in Bosnia-Herzegovina over the past years. With the arrival of the new equipment and technology, Croatia has become the biggest source of intelligence in southeastern Europe for the needs of the antiterrorist coalition. Cooperation with the US intelligence service has intensified several-fold.
The Croatian intelligence service, in cooperation with the Americans and the SFOR [Stabilization Force] Command in Bosnia-Herzegovina, has been instrumental in keeping under surveillance and arresting collaborators of Bin Ladin's network in Bosnia-Herzegovina. It has greatly reduced the transfer of foreign nationals across the Croatian border, and as the Zagreb Nacional magazine learns, claiming that discovery and arrest are imminent for war criminals Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic, who are already being kept under successful surveillance from Croatia by the new espionage equipment.
The US side had noticed that, because of an inability to invest in equipment for electronic surveillance within the NSEI [National Electronic Surveillance Service], the Croatian intelligence service was no longer capable of offering quality information, as it had done last year. This made the installation of the new equipment and the Watson system for automatic analysis of intelligence data in fact mutually advantageous. Nacional's source confirms that electronic surveillance had lately been in deep crisis, but the advent of the new surveillance equipment and new programmatic solutions for databases as surveillance support have changed the situation overnight.
After the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, the US Administration declared war on terrorism using all weapons. It designated Croatia, because of its prior positive record in intelligence exchange, as a very important partner in this part of Europe, especially because of the presence of mujahedin and foreign terrorists in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and attempts at illegal migration to the west via Croatia. From the early days, Croatia has been actively involved in the antiterrorist coalition, not only declaratively, but also through specific activities in intelligence exchange.
Over the past two months, Croatian President Stjepan Mesic met with the greatest and most important world leaders, presenting a series of proposals for the struggle against terrorism and trying to win recognition for the role played by Croatia in the antiterrorist coalition.
Mesic also recently met with US President Bush, who paid tribute to Croatia for its struggle against terrorism. And while he has been rather misunderstood and ignored at home, the international coalition against terrorism has recognized the importance of Croatia in the antiterrorist coalition, and the United States, as the leader of the coalition, has made an effort to provide technological assistance.
The importance attached by the United States to strengthening the Croatian surveillance system by providing the state-of-the-art Watson program for analyzing intelligence data is best illustrated by the fact that General Michael Hasden [name as published], director of the US National Security Agency (NSA) -- the most powerful US intelligence service -- has been directly involved since the very start of negotiations between Croatia and the United States in September of this year [as published]. The NSA is the US secret service with the highest budget in charge of monitoring and decoding all kinds of communication worldwide, and relies in its work on the Watson system, which has lately been present also in Croatia.
The United States has maintained successful cooperation in the intelligence area with the Croatian intelligence community since the early 1990's, both in the planning of military operations in the Balkans, and in the struggle against terrorism. This positive experience, despite the concern of US intelligence operatives over frequent scandals and conflicts in the state leadership on influence over the secret services, has led to a renewed full employment of the Croatian secret services in intelligence cooperation with their US colleagues.
The Croatian intelligence community can now monitor all kinds of digital and mobile communication, whose surveillance has so far been hampered and limited. Previously Croatian intelligence operatives had at their disposal technology that could successfully monitor only the 099 analog network, while with two German-made vans and NSEI surveillance equipment it monitored digital mobile phones. This kind of monitoring was exhausting for the operatives, so that their concentration would flag, while expenses far outstripped the hoped-for results. The equipment for monitoring digital mobile communication is very expensive and unavailable on the free market.
Today, all intelligence data collected is incredibly swiftly analyzed automatically by the Watson program. For example, in just a few seconds it responds to a single question about a person or event graphically or visually by collating and processing all available data, conversations, financial transactions -- of which there might be thousands -- and presents a complete picture for the user that can be displayed in the form of a diagram, map, chain of command, or the like. What Watson can do in a few seconds might take a team of analysts days, Nacional's source claims.
Apart from listening in on digital communication and mobile phones, the US intelligence gathering system in Croatia also traces the movements of a person under surveillance if the battery is in the mobile phone.
Every town in Croatia where part of the surveillance equipment has been installed covering the territory within a certain radius follows a traveler with a mobile phone and, the moment the traveler moves out of range of one surveillance station, he is picked up by another in the next town thanks to the identification code of each phone under surveillance. Surveillance equipment in Croatia operates in the same way as in foreign countries.
Surveillance by way of mobile phones even when the instrument is turned off is carried out by the relevant services dialing the number of the mobile phone and then, before dialing the last digit, running a particular code that turns on the microphone. The telephone thus becomes a "bug" which conveys all sounds up to 15 meters in diameter. This kind of surveillance can be disabled only by removing the battery from the mobile phone.
Each use of such sensitive surveillance equipment necessarily raises the question of abuse of the system. It is easily possible that, by using this technology, individual politicians in power may consult about their political rivals and then obliterate all trace of this, and without those who requested the surveillance being held to account for the abuse, because no evidence is forthcoming. The situation on the Croatian political scene and in the structures of the intelligence community is far from stable, and the use of a system such as Watson requires the preconditions of a democratic organization and a stable state in order to avoid the possibility of political abuse.
It is no secret that the EU members have similar systems, which they use for discovering terrorist and criminal activities in the Union member-states. However, they are all countries with long democratic traditions, political stability, and precisely defined mechanisms for the control and supervision of secret surveillance and tapping, unlike Croatia, Nacional's source claims.
Leading men in the intelligence community do not meet and coordinate their activities -- each is accountable only to their immediate political controller; the law on national security that is still in force is not being implemented, while no new law is forthcoming; and abuses are easiest now, because nobody knows who controls whom and who is accountable to whom.
Some intelligence community leaders would neither confirm nor deny Nacional's claims. The SZUP [Constitutional Order Protection Service -- Croatia's intelligence service] explicitly claims that, if such a system does in fact exist, it is not under their control, and a senior intelligence community official confirms Nacional's discovery and opines that the system operates as part of the NSEI, in view of the fact that the NSEI already has sufficiently skilled personnel and equipment capable of being easily enhanced. Nacional's sources agree on one point, however -- to wit, that Croatia and its national security needed such a system after the intelligence blackout of the National Electronic Surveillance Service [NSEI].
Because of technological insufficiencies and an inadequate technological superstructure on the one hand, and because of the modernization and introduction of digital equipment and telecommunications by the neighboring countries on the other, the NSEI was no longer capable of effectively eavesdropping on outside lines. The introduction of the US Watson analytical system will totally do away with the insufficiency of intelligence data in Croatia and outside its borders.
Although Croatia has acquired substantial technological advantage over the neighbors in intelligence data gathering, it is still regional in character. The biggest states, which have spy satellites, can record all telephonic communication (conversations, fax messages, e-mail messages, communication via the Internet) anywhere in the world.
An instrument radiates enough for the conversation to be picked up by satellite. Such conversations are then classified by computer and analyzed on the basis of the numbers of the transmitting and receiving phones, the location of the transmitting and receiving phones, time of the conversation, language, key words, and voice typing. Once classified and analyzed, the conversations are sent to analysts for checking.
Protection against this kind of surveillance is possible only if both the transmitting and receiving instruments are in rooms built on the lines of the Faraday Cage, and if all electrical cables and connections that transmit the signal are buried deep under the ground. If an intelligence service has "friendly ties" with the local telephone company, not even this kind of protection is safe.
Protection against attack by the new digital communication surveillance system, and especially mobile phones, boils down to only one option: the battery and any other power source should be completely removed. That is to say, there is no efficacious protection. It is possible -- the source claims -- to choose a somewhat less secure option of frequently changing the type of mobile phone and numbers by way of SIM cards and coupons, but this is totally uneconomical, while the least secure option is to become a subscriber to a mobile telephony network.
[Box] Against Corruption and PedophiliaThe Watson system was used to smash an Internet pedophile chain in 1996 and expose corruption in Italy in 1997. The Watson program software is the product of a US company for information management based in the US state of Massachusetts. Watson has lately been present in the Croatian intelligence community as well, being used for analyzing thousands of intelligence and other data that pours daily into its database by way of surveillance stations in Croatia.
[Box] For Combating TerrorismBy the end of the year [as published], the Republic of Croatia will have submitted a report to the [UN] Security Council on measures taken to combat terrorism. By embracing the Security Council's Resolution 1373 on suppressing international terrorism, Croatia has undertaken to keep the Security Council informed about the results of the campaign. First, Croatia must submit its report to the East River by the end of the year and, for the purposes of efficacious control, the government has set up an interdepartmental task force directly accountable to the UN Security Council. The task force comprises members of all governmental departments, headed by Josko Klisovic, head of the Foreign Ministry's Department for the United Nations. Resolution 1373 of the UN Security Council obligates all states efficaciously to combat terrorism, money laundering, international and financial crime, and to cooperate towards opening air space, freezing suspect bank accounts.... Each state must collect and share information on criminal activities and pass laws to combat these activities. The new Watson system will be of great help to Croatia in this respect.
[Description of Source: Belgrade Glas Javnosti in Serbo-Croatian -- independent, widely read daily]
___________________________
Intelligence Forum (http://www.intelforum.org) is sponsored by Intelligence and National Security, a Frank Cass journal (http://www.frankcass.com/jnls/ins.htm)
Possible Watson candidates:
PW writes:
This appears to be the package referred to by the article you recently posted.http://www.xanalys.com/watson.html
It looks like you can download a trial copy. And, I note that it seems to be named after Holmes' Watson.
Watson appears to be the visualization front-end for the system, not the actual back-end data collection technology. More information on the back-end collection systems would be particularly interesting.
Cryptome downloaded a trial copy (14MB) of the Xanalys Watson intelligence analysis program, fired it up and saw that it does indeed do graphical analysis of information similar to that described by Anonymous below for Harlequin and i2's Analysts Notebook. The program is fed data (which it does not collect) which it then correlates and diagrams according to a variety of categories or outputs desired. Sample analytical workfiles are for fraud, phone calls, finance and Jack the Ripper. The Croatian program is probably fed data from the surveillance and interception systems as well as locally-generated intelligence.
Xanalys provides information on its exhibits at a rogue's gallery of law enforcement and intelligence conferences, ACPO, IALEIA, IACP, OACP, ACFE -- well, Linuxworld in Germany is surely not a rogue penguin.
On Anonymous' comments below: Harlequin has merged with another firm and now sells graphical services under a new name. Xanalys appears to make use of material from Harlequin. I2's Analysts Notebook offers analysis products similar to Xanalys.
From Anonymous:
Watson is/was nothing more then a Windows-based program that was written about ten years back by a company in Cambridge Mass called "Harlequin, Inc." The software was very popular with intelligence analysts, and I was personally trained on it in a government school back in the mid-90s.The program allowed you to type in basic elements of a case, and in return the program printed up some pretty charts to impress the users' superiors. Watson is/was a charting and case management program for investigators, not an actual collection tool.
For example, an investigator could import a call record he got from the phone company into one file, and then cross index it to the list of suspects in another to create a basic link chart, then the investigator could query the NCIC or NAMES database and import the result. The user could also scan in picture of suspects, notes on evidence, and so on, but Watson did little more then let them draw pretty lines and print pretty charts.
Watson was eventually replaced by i2's Analysts Notebook, which also is designed primarily for making pretty pictures, with virtually no ability to actually collect or analyze the intelligence (just importing data and drawing pretty charts).
The name "Watson" comes from the name of Sherlock Holmes' assistant.
Both Watson and i2's product continue to be popular with law enforcement, but neither is anymore revolutionary then a simple word processor, spreadsheet, or scheduling program.
Ironically enough, Filemaker Pro, and Microsoft Access are more helpful to solving cases; but neither draws up pretty charts.
Other possibilities:
A product from IBM's Watson Research Laboratory:
http://www.watson.ibm.com/
Infolab's Watson:
http://dent.infolab.nwu.edu/infolab/projects/project.asp?ID=5
Watson the Web, search engine supplement:
http://www.watsontheweb.co.uk/
Watson for Mac OS X, search engine supplement:
http://www.karelia.com/watson/
Watson - ATT's Automatic Speech Recognition
http://www.research.att.com/projects/watson/
The Watson Project
http://www.latech.edu/~watson/