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ORIGINAL: littlewonder

So why is this such a big deal all of a sudden?

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ORIGINAL: Aswad


It's always been a big deal. Now, it's also a current topic.

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Bingo. It comes at a good moment as well, with the IRS demonstrating the ability and casual willingness of government to abuse the powers granted to them, in petty and spiteful ways. Let's at least broaden the understanding, while the opportunity is here.

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ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

Though I have to say, Aswad, I disagree with you about the value of security by obscurity.

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ORIGINAL: vincentML

IRS? No there there. No scandal. No groups were denied tax exempt status. They ALL shudda been. Drinkin the Issa Koolaid.

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ORIGINAL: papassion

Even though we have an FBI that was twice warned by the Russians about the Boston bombers. I guess it wasn't "politically correct" to track their whereabouts, being Muslim and all.

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Why go to Internet companies like Facebook, Google, and Yahoo for their data if you can just intercept it on the world’s network of fiber-optic cables?

That, apparently, is what British spy agency GCHQ is doing, according to new revelations from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. According to documents revealed by Snowden to the Guardian, GCHQ has tapped 200 of the world’s fibre optic cables, is surveilling more than 600 million “telephone events” a day, can intercept emails, check Internet users’ access of websites, and can see what people are posting on Facebook.

It’s called the Tempora program, and the British agency’s sharing the data with 850,000 NSA employees and private contractors.

According to the latest revelations, Britain actually has greater capabilities than the U.S. spy agencies and few legal constraints, making it a leader among the “five eyes” intelligence community of the U.S., Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand that is processing more metadata than the NSA.

Snowden’s documents indicate that GCHQ has built up this capability over five years by signing secret agreements with data transmission companies to attach probes to the trans-Atlantic cables where they hit British soil. As is the case with PRISM in the U.S., the companies are forbidden by law to either decline to participate or to reveal the spying to their customers or the general public.

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

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ORIGINAL: JeffBC

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ORIGINAL: DomKen
That is utter nonsense. You are making wild ass claims not backed up by anything. You claim to know network engineering but you seem to think the NSA could split the entire net's packet stream and no one would notice.

Yes, that is my claim. Not only do I claim that, I'll go you one further... it would be trivially easy to do so. I just got off the phone a while ago with a senior engineer at one of the backbone providers. Having read him some of your posts his comment was...

"Well, I'm sure that such things are beyond Ken's ability. They are not beyond mine or anyone I work with."

When I asked him whether this call was being recorded his response was "Duh."

Ok, I'll just say it. You're lying.

The backbone is not a single wire or some crap. It is literally thousands of routers and many thousands more fiber optic connections. I doubt anyone actually could even find all of them physically. You could split the packet stream at each router, if you could find them all but then what would you do with the data? Storing it locally would be noticed so it would have to go to something like the not yet completed and not yet operational Utah Data Center but that other location would need more bandwidth than any existing facility known to exist, since it would be receiving the entire net's packet stream in real time. Then since it would make no sense to grab the whole thing and simply throw it all away it would need to be stored and that capability simply doesn't exist. Just storing a few minutes of activity would require tens of thousands of the best hard drives commercially available which we know isn't happening because the manufactures simply can't make them that fast. The same applies to solid state storage as well. Then is the question of what the fuck you'd do with that much data? In order to search it effectively would require shoving it into a database. However indexing hundreds of billions of records with many millions or billions more added per second is not something that could be done even with an arbitrarily large cluster.

None of the sourced revelations of the last decade or so on the subject of the NSA projects even hints at scooping up the entire net. That is Alex Jones type conspiracy nuttiness.

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ORIGINAL: Esinn

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

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ORIGINAL: JeffBC

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ORIGINAL: DomKen
That is utter nonsense. You are making wild ass claims not backed up by anything. You claim to know network engineering but you seem to think the NSA could split the entire net's packet stream and no one would notice.

Yes, that is my claim. Not only do I claim that, I'll go you one further... it would be trivially easy to do so. I just got off the phone a while ago with a senior engineer at one of the backbone providers. Having read him some of your posts his comment was...

"Well, I'm sure that such things are beyond Ken's ability. They are not beyond mine or anyone I work with."

When I asked him whether this call was being recorded his response was "Duh."

Ok, I'll just say it. You're lying.

The backbone is not a single wire or some crap. It is literally thousands of routers and many thousands more fiber optic connections. I doubt anyone actually could even find all of them physically. You could split the packet stream at each router, if you could find them all but then what would you do with the data? Storing it locally would be noticed so it would have to go to something like the not yet completed and not yet operational Utah Data Center but that other location would need more bandwidth than any existing facility known to exist, since it would be receiving the entire net's packet stream in real time. Then since it would make no sense to grab the whole thing and simply throw it all away it would need to be stored and that capability simply doesn't exist. Just storing a few minutes of activity would require tens of thousands of the best hard drives commercially available which we know isn't happening because the manufactures simply can't make them that fast. The same applies to solid state storage as well. Then is the question of what the fuck you'd do with that much data? In order to search it effectively would require shoving it into a database. However indexing hundreds of billions of records with many millions or billions more added per second is not something that could be done even with an arbitrarily large cluster.

None of the sourced revelations of the last decade or so on the subject of the NSA projects even hints at scooping up the entire net. That is Alex Jones type conspiracy nuttiness.

The backbone is called "IXPs". I am happy to fill in technically for you where JeffBc is failing? Going through such databases is precisely what the NSA is doing or within 5-10 yrs intends to do, and will. I mean DARPA just put out a 100,000,000 contract relevant to python and exactly what you are calling impossible. I'd request we start here:
http://www.ixmaps.ca/tour.php

And you offer your technical review.

Your opinion is putting you at odds with William Binney who is recognized as the NSAs best cytologist. You seem smart enough to understand that. Finally, I am curious. It is now July 18th, my birthday. We know of multiple other programs and agency involvement. It your opinion changed at all? I did not read this thread in full.

Ty

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ORIGINAL: Phydeaux

There's enough blame to go around. The expansion of the NSA tapping to include all american traffic, including domestic occured in Obama's watch.
P

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ORIGINAL: Phydeaux
The data center in utah is one of 6 data centers in the US. It has the capacity of 5 zettabytes - or roughly 250 billion DVDs or roughly 100 years worth of worldwide communications.

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As of April 2012, no storage system has achieved one zettabyte of information. The combined space of all computer hard drives in the world was estimated at approximately 160 exabytes in 2006.[9] This has increased rapidly however, as Seagate Technology reported selling 330 exabytes worth of hard drives during the 2011 Fiscal Year.[10] As of 2009, the entire World Wide Web was estimated to contain close to 500 exabytes.[11] This is one half zettabyte.

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ORIGINAL: Kirata

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ORIGINAL: DomKen

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ORIGINAL: Phydeaux
The data center in utah is one of 6 data centers in the US. It has the capacity of 5 zettabytes - or roughly 250 billion DVDs or roughly 100 years worth of worldwide communications.

No it does not. That much storage simply doesn't exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettabyte

Not only does your link say no such thing, it cites NPR's report (excerpted below) on the estimated capacity of the NSA's Utah Data Center:

The NSA's Utah Data Center will be able to handle and process five zettabytes of data, according to William Binney, a former NSA technical director turned whistleblower. Binney's calculation is an estimate. An NSA spokeswoman says the actual data capacity of the center is classified... NSA does provide some measure of the computing power at its new data farm in Utah. It requires 65 megawatts of power, enough for 65,000 homes. It also has its own power substation.

K.