Data Intercept Technology Unit

The Data Intercept Technology Unit (DITU, pronounced DEE-too) is a unit of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States, which is responsible for intercepting telephone calls and e-mail messages of terrorists and foreign intelligence targets inside the US. It is not known when DITU was established, but the unit already existed in 1997.

DITU is located at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, which is also the home of the FBI's training academy. DITU is probably part of the FBI's Operational Technology Division, which is responsible for all technical intelligence collection. In 2010, DITU had organized it's activities into seven regions, each with a Storage Area Network (SAN).

Internet interception

Slide about NSA's PRISM program which mentions the role of DITU in collecting the data

In the mid-1990s, DITU managed an FBI program for collecting metadata from internet traffic codenamed Omnivore, which in 1998 was replaced by a new system, called Carnivore. Carnivore consisted of Microsoft workstations with packet-sniffing software which were physically installed at an Internet service provider (ISP) or other location where it can "sniff" traffic on a LAN segment to look for email messages in transit.

By 2005, Carnivore had been replaced by commercial software such as NarusInsight. A report in 2007 described this successor system as being located "inside an Internet provider's network at the junction point of a router or network switch" and capable of indiscriminately storing data flowing through the provider's network.

The raw data collected by these systems are decoded and put together by a tool called Packeteer and these can be viewed by using a custom made software interface called CoolMiner. FBI field offices have CoolMiner workstations that can access the collected data which were stored at the Storage Area Network (SAN) of their region.

Since the NSA set up the PRISM program in 2007, it's DITU that actually picks up the data at the various internet companies, like Facebook, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo, before passing them on to the NSA for further processing, analysing and storing.

DITU also works closely with the three biggest American telecommunications providers (AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint) to "ensure its ability to intercept the telephone and Internet communications of its domestic targets, as well as the NSA's ability to intercept electronic communications transiting through the United States on fiber-optic cables".

External link

• Meet the Spies Doing the NSA's Dirty Work