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Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/14/2013 10:19:46 AM   
JeffBC


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Joined: 2/12/2012
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Status: offline 		tl;dr
Yes

OK, so this has come up in a wide variety of the current surveillance threads and those who don't really know what they are talking about continue to make assertions about either the technical capability or the motivation of the government to do such a thing. Yet anyone who understands internet architecture knows that tapping a few key points would get you most or all of everything. Anyone who understands knows that there is plenty of spare capacity already laying in the ground to carry the total internet several times over. In other words, it is technically possible

AND IT'S BEING DONE RIGHT NOW

Although the president told the nation that his NSA eavesdropping program was limited to known Al Qaeda agents or supporters abroad making calls into the U.S., comments of other administration officials and intelligence veterans indicate that the NSA cast its net far more widely. AT&T technician Mark Klein inadvertently discovered that the whole flow of Internet traffic in several AT&T operations centers was being regularly diverted to the NSA, a charge indirectly substantiated by John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who wrote the official legal memos legitimizing the president's warrantless wiretapping program. Yoo told FRONTLINE: "The government needs to have access to international communications so that it can try to find communications that are coming into the country where Al Qaeda's trying to send messages to cell members in the country. In order to do that, it does have to have access to communication networks."
--- pbs link

The President's Surveillance Program activities were periodically reauthorized by the President, and were later transitioned to authority granted in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008. The act required the Inspectors General of all intelligence agencies involved in the program to "complete a comprehensive review" of the activities through January 17, 2007, and produce an unclassified report within one year after enactment. The report published on July 10, 2009 concluded that the President's program involved "unprecedented collection activities" that went far beyond the scope of the Terrorist Surveillance Program.[1] The report raised questions over the legal underpinnings of the authorizations, a lack of oversight, excessive secrecy, and the effectiveness of the program.[4][5] The report concluded that the program was built on a "factually flawed" legal analysis.[6]
--- Wikipedia reference
--- Original Report

I just wanted to isolate the "is it technically possible" and "are they doing it" questions from the policy questions because it is easy to answer and the facts are already known. Things like Stellar Wind give them a place to dump all that and perhaps a way to mine it all. But yes, they are intercepting 100% (or very near that) of packets flowing through Signatories to the UKUSA Security Agreement (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Where those packets are being routed to and what's being done with them is, of course, unknown but the leaks about Stellar Window snap right into that picture.

< Message edited by JeffBC -- 6/14/2013 10:21:23 AM >

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RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/14/2013 10:29:28 AM   
pahunkboy


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RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/14/2013 11:08:58 AM   
DomKen


Posts: 19457
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From: Chicago, IL
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quote:

ORIGINAL: JeffBC

tl;dr
Yes

OK, so this has come up in a wide variety of the current surveillance threads and those who don't really know what they are talking about continue to make assertions about either the technical capability or the motivation of the government to do such a thing. Yet anyone who understands internet architecture knows that tapping a few key points would get you most or all of everything. Anyone who understands knows that there is plenty of spare capacity already laying in the ground to carry the total internet several times over. In other words, it is technically possible

AND IT'S BEING DONE RIGHT NOW

Although the president told the nation that his NSA eavesdropping program was limited to known Al Qaeda agents or supporters abroad making calls into the U.S., comments of other administration officials and intelligence veterans indicate that the NSA cast its net far more widely. AT&T technician Mark Klein inadvertently discovered that the whole flow of Internet traffic in several AT&T operations centers was being regularly diverted to the NSA, a charge indirectly substantiated by John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who wrote the official legal memos legitimizing the president's warrantless wiretapping program. Yoo told FRONTLINE: "The government needs to have access to international communications so that it can try to find communications that are coming into the country where Al Qaeda's trying to send messages to cell members in the country. In order to do that, it does have to have access to communication networks."
--- pbs link

The President's Surveillance Program activities were periodically reauthorized by the President, and were later transitioned to authority granted in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008. The act required the Inspectors General of all intelligence agencies involved in the program to "complete a comprehensive review" of the activities through January 17, 2007, and produce an unclassified report within one year after enactment. The report published on July 10, 2009 concluded that the President's program involved "unprecedented collection activities" that went far beyond the scope of the Terrorist Surveillance Program.[1] The report raised questions over the legal underpinnings of the authorizations, a lack of oversight, excessive secrecy, and the effectiveness of the program.[4][5] The report concluded that the program was built on a "factually flawed" legal analysis.[6]
--- Wikipedia reference
--- Original Report

I just wanted to isolate the "is it technically possible" and "are they doing it" questions from the policy questions because it is easy to answer and the facts are already known. Things like Stellar Wind give them a place to dump all that and perhaps a way to mine it all. But yes, they are intercepting 100% (or very near that) of packets flowing through Signatories to the UKUSA Security Agreement (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Where those packets are being routed to and what's being done with them is, of course, unknown but the leaks about Stellar Window snap right into that picture.

We already went over this, it is both technically unlikely to actually do what you claim, note that your source even says it isn't being done, but that even if it was done the quantity of information would make doing anything with it impossible.

Note that the primary piece of equipment supposedly in room 641A was a computer system intended to detect packets going to or from specific ip addys for the purpose of actually recording those and not all the other stuff. That is what the NSA could do then and by all actually reliable reports that is all the NSA does now.

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RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/14/2013 2:50:32 PM   
JeffBC


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quote:

ORIGINAL: DomKen
We already went over this, it is both technically unlikely

Well Ken... I'm afraid at this point you are arguing with actual, known, factual reality. I have no answer for you.

The rest of the readers will need to determine for themselves if the GAO and zillions of leaks and several direct comments from various NSA directors are all wrong and your wild speculation are correct.


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RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/14/2013 4:03:23 PM   
DomKen


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quote:

ORIGINAL: JeffBC

quote:

ORIGINAL: DomKen
We already went over this, it is both technically unlikely

Well Ken... I'm afraid at this point you are arguing with actual, known, factual reality. I have no answer for you.

The rest of the readers will need to determine for themselves if the GAO and zillions of leaks and several direct comments from various NSA directors are all wrong and your wild speculation are correct.


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.

Note that the Boston bomber went to at least one jihadi website forum and read the AQ magazine on how to make the pressure cooker bomb. If the NSA was really monitoring the entire net wouldn't a person in the US reading that article be a fairly major red flag?

Furthermore details of Yahoo's attempt to resist the NSA came out today and the NSA specifically was seeking only certain information on specific foreign users.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/technology/secret-court-ruling-put-tech-companies-in-data-bind.html

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RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/14/2013 4:22:35 PM   
JeffBC


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quote:

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."

_____________________________

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RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/14/2013 4:55:05 PM   
DomKen


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quote:

ORIGINAL: JeffBC

quote:

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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RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/14/2013 5:00:12 PM   
DomKen


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From: Chicago, IL
Status: offline 		BTW even the NSA's own top secret presentation on PRISM doesn't claim they are grabbing all network traffic.



Why specify those nine companies and those specific things if you could actually get every bit of online activity which is what you claim?



Attachment (1)

< Message edited by DomKen -- 6/14/2013 5:01:49 PM >

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RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/14/2013 7:05:07 PM   
TheHeretic


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Status: offline 		Well of course they can.

Since we are talking about contacts for capability, I tossed a hypothetical at mine, on how someone flagged for individual scrutiny might send a secure email. I was told that the best way would be to create it in a computer that was never connected to the internet, put it on a flash drive, and have someone carry it to the recipient, who could read it on another computer that was never connected to the internet.

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RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/14/2013 7:13:10 PM   
JeffBC


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quote:

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

Ahhhh... the "you're lying" rebuttal. That is always very convincing.

quote:

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.

Why do you see the above as a problem?

quote:

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.

You keep asserting that but why? Here though, let me help you out a bit. Between netflix and bittorrent roughly 33% of all internet traffic is accounted for and none of it needs to be captured or stored. So with some of the most obvious filtering we've cut the problem down by 33%. Imagine what could be done if we actually... you know... studied the problem a bit. How do I know these things? Because I was just talking to the guy you think I'm lying about. to be specific, in prime time Netflix is 50% of all net traffic and in general bittorrent accounts for 25%. I made a conservative average of 33%. How do I know that any of the backbone providers could carry the entire traffic load if the others went down? Same answer. Both of those statements could probably be independently checked with enough google-fu. But honestly, I'm getting tired of providing facts, figured, links, and references and having to face a rebuttal of "you're lying".

Too bad there aren't too many backbone engineers around. I doubt one could chime in here. I think the other readers are going to need to make their own determinations about who is more credible... me with my links, figures, leaks, GAO reports and the like. Or you with "you're lying".

_____________________________

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RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/14/2013 7:25:51 PM   
JeffBC


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quote:

ORIGINAL: TheHeretic
Since we are talking about contacts for capability, I tossed a hypothetical at mine, on how someone flagged for individual scrutiny might send a secure email. I was told that the best way would be to create it in a computer that was never connected to the internet, put it on a flash drive, and have someone carry it to the recipient, who could read it on another computer that was never connected to the internet.

*nods* I just asked another of my contacts.. this time a security geek... whether it was possible to secure a computer (which would allow you to connect it to the internet and rely on crypto to keep your traffic safe). His answer was "no". It's too easy to infiltrate at virtually every point starting with the CPU and working on up.

The only way to stop the NSA is to reign in the government. As long as they are allowed to operate with impunity and in the shadows with infinite budgets and secret courts to back them up you simply cannot transfer data unless it is by hand.

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RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/14/2013 7:35:32 PM   
YN


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quote:

ORIGINAL: TheHeretic

Well of course they can.

Since we are talking about contacts for capability, I tossed a hypothetical at mine, on how someone flagged for individual scrutiny might send a secure email. I was told that the best way would be to create it in a computer that was never connected to the internet, put it on a flash drive, and have someone carry it to the recipient, who could read it on another computer that was never connected to the internet.



The drug criminals merely use "burner" cellphones with email abilities. And the "thieves cant" they use and the protocols they follow make intercepting their emails essentially useless.

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RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/14/2013 7:47:42 PM   
YN


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quote:

ORIGINAL: JeffBC

quote:

ORIGINAL: TheHeretic
Since we are talking about contacts for capability, I tossed a hypothetical at mine, on how someone flagged for individual scrutiny might send a secure email. I was told that the best way would be to create it in a computer that was never connected to the internet, put it on a flash drive, and have someone carry it to the recipient, who could read it on another computer that was never connected to the internet.

*nods* I just asked another of my contacts.. this time a security geek... whether it was possible to secure a computer (which would allow you to connect it to the internet and rely on crypto to keep your traffic safe). His answer was "no". It's too easy to infiltrate at virtually every point starting with the CPU and working on up.

The only way to stop the NSA is to reign in the government. As long as they are allowed to operate with impunity and in the shadows with infinite budgets and secret courts to back them up you simply cannot transfer data unless it is by hand.


Yes and no. If you had a laptop with wi-fi, and used wi-fi access points and "internet cafes" and and made your hardware identification numbers programmable or swapped the wi-fi cards or network adapters out regularly, and used some security protocols, you would be a very hard case to track.


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RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/14/2013 7:55:03 PM   
Rule


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quote:

ORIGINAL: JeffBC
I think the other readers are going to need to make their own determinations about who is more credible... me with my links, figures, leaks, GAO reports and the like. Or you with "you're lying".

We know DomKen.


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RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/14/2013 8:30:31 PM   
JeffBC


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quote:

ORIGINAL: YN
Yes and no. If you had a laptop with wi-fi, and used wi-fi access points and "internet cafes" and and made your hardware identification numbers programmable or swapped the wi-fi cards or network adapters out regularly, and used some security protocols, you would be a very hard case to track.

I wasn't thinking of tracking the human. I was pondering the ability to hook a computer to the internet and communicate privately. You are, of course, correct that without some sort of physical eyes-on evidence it'd be hard to connect the laptop with a given human.

Don't get me wrong. All this stuff is not complete yet. But watching the mousetrap get built piece by piece is still somewhat concerning.


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RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/14/2013 8:41:22 PM   
DomKen


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quote:

ORIGINAL: JeffBC

quote:

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

Ahhhh... the "you're lying" rebuttal. That is always very convincing.

quote:

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.

Why do you see the above as a problem?

quote:

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.

You keep asserting that but why? Here though, let me help you out a bit. Between netflix and bittorrent roughly 33% of all internet traffic is accounted for and none of it needs to be captured or stored. So with some of the most obvious filtering we've cut the problem down by 33%. Imagine what could be done if we actually... you know... studied the problem a bit. How do I know these things? Because I was just talking to the guy you think I'm lying about. to be specific, in prime time Netflix is 50% of all net traffic and in general bittorrent accounts for 25%. I made a conservative average of 33%. How do I know that any of the backbone providers could carry the entire traffic load if the others went down? Same answer. Both of those statements could probably be independently checked with enough google-fu. But honestly, I'm getting tired of providing facts, figured, links, and references and having to face a rebuttal of "you're lying".

Too bad there aren't too many backbone engineers around. I doubt one could chime in here. I think the other readers are going to need to make their own determinations about who is more credible... me with my links, figures, leaks, GAO reports and the like. Or you with "you're lying".

Why would you toss out bittorrent? If a terrorist wanted to distribute a document and thought bittorrent wasn't monitored that's how he'd do it. For instance the Inspire magazine that started this whole discussion.

And you've got your numbers wrong. Netflix is about 1/3 of peak period download traffic not half.
http://www.theatlanticwire.com/technology/2013/05/netflix-youtube-traffic/65210/

But the only way to discard those packets is to catch the whole thing and sniff for packets with the specific ip's which means you need high speed processing power and massive storage.

You really don't understand the idea of a distributed network. The backbone is not a group of routers in series. If a router is down the packets are simply routed around the outage. Although if it is a major backbone router shifting the load does cause a general slowdown in traffic speed. You can easily enough google for the news reports when that sort of thing happens, best look back several years there is a lot more capacity now.

BTW what GAO reports? you've never linked any such thing. The closest thing is the DoD IG report which you only linked to the first couple of pages of.
here is what the conclusion of that document had to say
quote:

Pursuant to this authority the NSA conducted new intelligence
activities, including the collection of the content of communications into and
out of the United States, where one party to the communication was
reasonably believed to be a member of al-Qa'ida or its affiliates. The NSA
analyzed this information for dissemination as leads to the IC, principally to
the CIA and the FBI. As described in the IG reports, the scope of this
collection authority changed over the course of the PSP.

http://en.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=File%3AUnclassified_Report_on_the_President%E2%80%99s_Surveillance_Program.pdf&page=1

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RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/14/2013 11:24:19 PM   
njlauren


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Status: offline 		Packets going across the internet route through a variety of routes, through a series of routers and so forth, the internet was designed to be redundant and to do that it needs to adjust, for example, if systems or communications lines were knocked out, presumably in a war. So to 'tap' the entire internet traffic would be very difficult, because the packets that make up the traffic go by varying routes. You could pick it up by tapping the source or by the receiving machine, but in between would be very difficult because the packets go by way of coxies barn.

What the NSA apparent can do is tap into ISP's systems and gather traffic and data, but that is different. So, if you are on for example FIOS, they could have hooks into Verizon's servers and allow them to see traffic originating or coming into there. This they apparently can and do do, I have heard reports from people I know and trust that the NSA does have hooks in a lot of ISP's, which they can use at will.

Even assuming the NSA could 'tap the entire internet', even assuming they had server farms with disks big enough to store it, they would have a devil of a time trying to process it, it would probably take them many years to process 1 days total internet traffic, and that is being generous.

I doubt the government is monitoring people's internet traffic like this, I suspect the NSA is doing data profiling on general data coming off phone records, and maybe even profiling certain characteristics of traffic, and then if they find something drilling down, otherwise they would not be able to do much of anything, there is just too much data.

There are concerns with all of this, I don't believe a scumbag like John Boehner when he says "you have nothing to be afraid of, there are all kinds of safeguards", the problem is if the NSA can get data without warrants, if they require ISP's to have NSA hooks in their systems, it can be abused, because the safeguards Boehner talks about is a joke. FISA is pretty much a rubber stamp, and congress has shown that when it comes to the spooks, they are more like cheerleaders then people doing oversight IMO. What concerns me is if the NSA become as the FBI and even the CIA became at times, the personal blackmail agents for someone wanting something done or whatever. Given the history of J. Edgar Hoover, of Nixon and the CIA, it is foolish to ever believe that programs done in good faith can't be perverted, because they have been.

I don't think the NSA or anyone has the big brother capabilities some are afraid of, but they have enough power with what they can do that we should be concerned. Remember the hallmark of almost all the authoritarian governments was that the police state they had, the oppression of their own people, was needed to protect against outside threats, The Soviets claimed it was western governments out to destroy the revolution, Mao said the same thing, Hitler said it was internal and external enemies, and the threat of terrorism is a perfect Casus Belli for anyone wanting to grab onto more power...hence the concern.

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RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/15/2013 1:02:05 AM   
JeffBC


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quote:

ORIGINAL: njlauren
So to 'tap' the entire internet traffic would be very difficult, because the packets that make up the traffic go by varying routes. You could pick it up by tapping the source or by the receiving machine, but in between would be very difficult because the packets go by way of coxies barn.


Undisputed tapping of San Jose node
I'll ask tomorrow how the short-haul traffic is captured.

Even assuming the NSA could 'tap the entire internet'
Again, we need not assume that. The above diagram pretty clearly illustrates how trivially easy the intercept part would be (pending the answer I need for short-haul)

even assuming they had server farms with disks big enough to store it, they would have a devil of a time trying to process it, it would probably take them many years to process 1 days total internet traffic, and that is being generous.
I did a quick bit of googling. Throughput on sustained write is no problem. I'll need to do some math on the capacity part but let's remember that you don't need to build out your SAN entirely before you start. You just need to keep adding storage faster than about 125TB/s (250/2 - assuming 50% is garbage like the bittorrent and netflix examples)

I doubt the government is monitoring people's internet traffic like this, I suspect the NSA is doing data profiling on general data coming off phone records, and maybe even profiling certain characteristics of traffic, and then if they find something drilling down, otherwise they would not be able to do much of anything, there is just too much data.
Well of course. There's going to be scanners checking for this and that with an attempt to check as many high level characteristics as possible before raising a flag to "drill down". It's that "drill down" operation that concerns me. One possible flag is, "He's running against me in the next election". I also suspect that you have no big data experience either but honestly neither do I and neither do any of my acquaintances... I'm afraid our relevant skill sets are around the security, network engineering and legal. However, it hardly matters. For now if they can just archive it all it wont' be long before the required processing power is available if it isn't now. And it's not an all or nothing proposition.

I don't think the NSA or anyone has the big brother capabilities some are afraid of, but they have enough power with what they can do that we should be concerned.
Again, I agree. They don't have enough to create my magic crystal ball viewing machine quite yet. They're scrambling to build it as fast as they can. You are right to be concerned though given that all this time we've been discussing tapping the entire internet. Obviously they could do much with only a tiny fraction of that. Crap, facebook and google alone (back to PRISM) would tell much of my life story.


< Message edited by JeffBC -- 6/15/2013 1:34:50 AM >

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(in reply to njlauren)
Profile   Post #: 18
RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/15/2013 1:08:52 AM   
JeffBC


Posts: 5799
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From: Canada
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quote:

ORIGINAL: DomKen
Why would you toss out bittorrent?

You don't need all the torrent traffic because the torrents with a given hash are all identical so you only capture it once. That's the same reason you don't need all the netflix traffic. It's a known data stream you just need it's hash after the first capture.

My bad in incorrectly citing the name origin of the report... one too many cut & pastes. Also my bad on the netflix number. I was trying to read off a yellow sticky that I'd cribbed the notes from the call on. But the final number I'm still comfortable with as an approximation.

30% peak hours netflix
25% all hours bittorrent

I [weighted] averaged that to 33% overall. In other words, I correctly read the final result so the math remains unchanged.

< Message edited by JeffBC -- 6/15/2013 1:49:21 AM >

_____________________________

I'm a lover of "what is", not because I'm a spiritual person, but because it hurts when I argue with reality. -- Bryon Katie
"You're humbly arrogant" -- sunshinemiss
officially a member of the K Crowd

(in reply to DomKen)
Profile   Post #: 19
RE: Is the Govt. "tapping" the Internet? - 6/15/2013 6:08:07 AM   
DomKen


Posts: 19457
Joined: 7/4/2004
From: Chicago, IL
Status: offline
quote:

ORIGINAL: JeffBC

quote:

ORIGINAL: DomKen
Why would you toss out bittorrent?

You don't need all the torrent traffic because the torrents with a given hash are all identical so you only capture it once. That's the same reason you don't need all the netflix traffic. It's a known data stream you just need it's hash after the first capture.

My bad in incorrectly citing the name origin of the report... one too many cut & pastes. Also my bad on the netflix number. I was trying to read off a yellow sticky that I'd cribbed the notes from the call on. But the final number I'm still comfortable with as an approximation.

30% peak hours netflix
25% all hours bittorrent

I [weighted] averaged that to 33% overall. In other words, I correctly read the final result so the math remains unchanged.

But you can't identify a torrent that way until you build up the torrent file section from the individual packets. So you need yet more processing power that does nothing but try and put together torrent pieces out of the packet stream.

Anyway you have way over estimated the amount of bittorrent traffic out there. It is only just over 3% of total worldwide bandwidth and less than 2% of US bandwidth.
http://researchcenter.paloaltonetworks.com/app-usage-risk-report-visualization/#sthash.7wgpBVWi.dpbs

The only reason you could, relatively, efficiently throw out the streaming video services is because they would all be coming from the same set of ip addresses. Since the sender ip is always in the same location in the packet header it would be fairly simple to search for known "safe" sources, although it would be then possible to send your "illegal" traffic without being monitored by spoofing the sender ip addy to be one of these ignored ones. Software to do this is readily available right now on the internet. It would be trivial to setup your computer to always send out your ip packets as ones from such a "ignored" ip. It would then be possible, assuming both ends do this to serve webpages and even do text chatting between the two computers securely (it might even be possible to video chat and the like I'm not sure if those applications care about the sender ip in the packets.

So in short you cannot actually throw away any great percentage of internet traffic if your intent is to monitor the whole thing. What the NSA is doing is what the PRISM slides say they are doing. They have penetrated certain internet companies servers and can monitor specific persons activity on those servers and they have some access to the router backbones clearly for the same purpose, monitoring very specific ip address traffic, note spoofing the sender ip is possible but you can't spoof the destination ip so it would be possible, with hardware we know the NSA has, to monitor a router for all ip traffic going to a specific destination ip and save all that but the only reason, and legal way, to do that is with a wiretap warrant.

(in reply to JeffBC)
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