Information about every cell phone in the country is in a Neustar database. Which is why it's kind of weird that 400 or so companies trust them to deal with law enforcement surveillance requests.
A Delaware-based company that didn't exist 20 years ago has quietly become one of the major players in surveillance infrastructure — but they've been so under the radar that leading online privacy and security expert Chris Soghoian, a fellow at the Open Society Foundations, calls them the "Keyzer Söze of surveillance." Meet Neustar, one of the most important companies you've never heard of.
Over 400 telecommunications companies go to Neustar when they want to outsource law enforcement data requests. While it's not known how many law enforcement requests for cell and VoIP data they get, consider the volume that one of their client's, Cricket, copped to: 116 a day on average, or 42,500 law enforcement requests last year.
On Monday, the New York Times reported that cell phone surveillance requests by law enforcement have grown massively. This past year, police and federal agents asked wireless carriers for access to data —including text messages, cell phone locations, wiretaps —1.5 million times.
Neustar isn't a wireless carrier. But they are one of a number of companies that work in the background, providing part of the invisible network that undergirds all the electronic communication. And sometimes it takes a specific issue, like how phone companies deal with law enforcement queries, to illuminate the big and complicated and potentially scary institutions hidden in plain sight.
Information gleaned from Neustar's latest SEC filing, as well as their own website, shows that they have their hands in many different pots, outsourced surveillance being only one of them.
The company was originally founded as a department inside aerospace giant Lockheed Martin, developed to help phone carriers assign phone numbers in a portable fashion — that is, letting people keep the same (landline) number even if they switched phone companies. Neustar was spun off in 1999 after the parent company bought a telecommunications company and concerns rose about its ability to maintain "neutrality." In 2003, the business changed again when Neustar introduced cellphone portability: the ability to keep your phone number across different carriers.
A Neustar ad
Source: youtube.com
By then, Neustar had also gotten into the internet game, winning a contract to administer ".biz" domain in Australia. (They would eventually control ".biz," and ".us" and are currently applying for over 300 new top-level domains, including ".nyc.") The company timeline details a series of acquisitions that leveraged its existing strength managing databases: buying Webmetrics, for instance, in 2008, gave it the ability to provide website management service to clients. More recently, they make money from providing web security services — a Neustar employee, Rodney Joffe, advises the White House on cybersecurity issues. In addition to issuing phone numbers, Neustar also provides caller-ID to United States carriers and, according to SEC filing, "real-time identification and location services to over 1,000 businesses in the U.S across multiple industries."
That's not even all Neustar does: They are also the people behind short codes (the five-digit text numbers often used to give donations, like the Red Cross or political campaigns) and UltraViolet, Hollywood's new DRM system for multi-platform cloud-based streaming.
Again, from the SEC filing:
With respect to our roles as the North American Numbering Plan Administrator, National Pooling Administrator, administrator of local number portability for the communications industry, operator of the sole authoritative registry for the .us and .biz Internet domain names, and operator of the sole authoritative registry for U.S. Common Short Codes, there are no other providers currently providing the services we offer.
