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by First filed in 2005, the NSA (National Security Agency) has been granted a patent for techniques used to detect unwanted entities snooping traffic on the Internet. At its heart, the NSA looks for unnatural lag in the network at various levels. The lag could exist between different OSI layers or be exhibited as a slight time difference in packet traversal between known hosts. It’s not the first time such an idea has been used to detect anomalous network activity, in 1999 l0pht released Anti-Sniff, a tool detecting ethernet lag as a result of cards operating in promiscuous mode.
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Why? by Occams :: NR8 :: Show
It is hard to believe that the NSA now seriously expects other spy agencies to respect its patent on this technology. They must know that spying does not work like that. How could they enforce it?
So why did it take this action. Possibly to advertise to its competitors that it had the technology to detect their activity? Again, spy agencies do not behave like that- better to catch them at it.
Could it be that the boys in the lab are so darn proud of their achievement that they want some recognition?