Verint makes a mint from govt. spyware
By Kevin Poulsen, SecurityFocus
Online
Posted: 14/03/2003 at 10:15 GMT
If you're under FBI surveillance, there's a good chance your phone
calls and Internet traffic are traveling over the equipment of Verint
Systems -- a company that's doing very well these days, writes
SecurityFocus' Kevin Poulsen.
New York-based technology firm Verint Systems recently launched a product
called "IntelliFind" that claims impressive capabilities. The
system is designed to be attached to the phone lines at a company's call
center, where it silently monitors every telephone call, and -- using
advanced voice recognition technology -- picks out conversations in which
certain keywords are spoken, dumping a digital recording into a
searchable database. "You can decide you want to see all the calls
where product 'xyz' was mentioned, and then you can pick one and listen
to that entire call," says Alan Roden, Verint's VP of corporate
development.
If IntelliFind sounds like something that would normally be found on a
supercomputer humming in an NSA basement, there's a reason. Behind
business intelligence offerings like IntelliFind, and a line of
networkable video cameras, Verint is a leading maker of electronic
surveillance equipment and software for the United States and other
governments. And it turns out that while other technology firms are
struggling in a down economy, the business of helping governments with
their spying may be a growth industry. In quarterly results announced
Wednesday, Verint, a subsidiary of Comverse Technology, posted record
sales of $42 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2002 -- the
company's third straight quarter of growth since going public in May
2002.
"During the year we believe that a greater interest in gathering
intelligence to prevent criminal activity by government and law
enforcement agencies resulted in greater demand for our communication
interception solutions," said company president Dan Bodner in a
conference call for analysts. "Over the past year we enhanced our
competitive position by entering new markets, expanding our customer
base, and introducing new capabilities for the analysis of content and
culled data collected from wireline, wireless and data networks."
Among those new markets was an unnamed country "in the Latin America
region" whose government recently placed a multi-million dollar
order for communications interception systems, said Bodner.
Bodner didn't say what the Latin American government bought with that
money, but the mainstay of Verint's electronic surveillance business is
its "STAR-GATE" and "RELIANT" products, which operate
on the supply and consumption sides of domestic spying respectively. The
RELIANT system acts as a government agency's big ear, collecting and
managing intercepted voice, e-mail, fax, SMS, data, chat, and Web
browsing -- all on a single platform. On the delivery side, STAR-GATE
does the actual wiretapping, and is primarily marketed to telephone
companies trying to comply with the 1994 Communications Assistance for
Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which requires telecommunications carriers
to keep their networks wiretap friendly for the FBI. An ISP version of
STAR-GATE lets Internet providers conduct lawful surveillance of their
customers and send the intercepted data to law enforcement over private
networks.
PATRIOT Profits
With recent legislation and court decisions granting U.S. law enforcement
agencies greater spying powers than they've had since the Nixon
administration, government surveillance solutions look like a good bet,
and other technology companies are getting in on the game. Last Fall,
VeriSign launched its "NetDiscovery" service -- a turnkey CALEA
solution for telephone companies that sends intercepted communications to
law enforcement over a national IP-based network, using Verint STAR-GATEs
for the taps. And last August, computer security company Network
Associates got into the Carnivore business with its acquisition of
Utah-based Traxess, makers of the "DragNet" Internet spy tool.
And for every company that makes the news with a surveillance system,
there may be countless more that nobody's ever heard of. When the
non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center recently obtained a list
of companies vying for a piece of the Defense Department's "Total
Information Awareness" computerized spying project, the list of
bidders included nearly as many obscure companies as it did brand name
defense contractors. "It looks like there's this whole world of
these little security technology companies that are probably doing well
these days," says EPIC attorney David Sobel.
But Gartner analyst John Pescatore isn't convinced that there's big money
in domestic surveillance. Instead, he says, the real opportunities are in
helping the U.S. perform surveillance internationally. Indeed, according
to its quarterly report, Verint has a subsidiary that provides
communications interception solutions to what's described demurely as
"various U.S. government agencies." The subsidiary's offices
hold a facility security clearance from the Defense Department, and are
located in Chantilly, Virginia, a stone's throw from most of America's
intelligence agencies.
"Certainly with the USA-PATRIOT Act and all this homeland security
stuff, there's been more effort in domestic collection," says
Pescatore. "But the domestic type money has been a lot slower to
start flowing than the national intelligence stuff... There's been
definite growth there."
� SecurityFocus Online
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