Data Intercept Technology Unit
| Federal Bureau of Investigation | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Common name | Federal Bureau of Investigation | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Abbreviation | FBI | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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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 part of the FBI's Operational Technology Division (OTD), which is responsible for all technical intelligence collection, and is located at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, which is also the home of the FBI's training academy. In 2010, DITU had organized its activities into seven regions.
In the late 1990s, DITU managed an FBI program codenamed Omnivore, which was established in 1997. This program was able to capture the e-mail messages of a specific target from the e-mail traffic that travelled through the network of an Internet service provider (ISP). The e-mail that was filtered out could be saved on a tape-backup drive or printed in real-time.
In 1999, Omnivore was replaced by three new tools from the DragonWare Suite: Carnivore, Packeteer and CoolMiner.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. Between 1998 and 2000 Carnivore was used about 25 times.
By 2005, Carnivore had been replaced by commercial software such as NarusInsight.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 are stored at the Storage Area Network (SAN) of one of the seven DITU regions.
In August 2013, CNet reported that DITU helped developing custom "port reader" software that enables the FBI to collect metadata from internet traffic in real time. This software copies the internet communications as they flow through a network and then extracts only the requested metadata. The CNet report says that the FBI is quietly pressing telecom carriers and Internet service providers to install this software onto their networks, so it can be used in cases where the carriers' own lawful interception equipment cannot fully provide the data the Bureau is looking for.
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