US fraction of world's traffic

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: David P. Reed [dpreed () reed com]
Sent: Tuesday, January 15, 2008 11:56 AM
To: David Farber
Cc: ip; Whitfield Diffie
Subject: Re: [IP] US fraction of world's traffic

I would think that the more interesting question is not the official
one, but the correct one.  To the extent that NSA uses this as a tool
for claiming that monitoring calls from country A to country B is
legitimate, the "correct" answer matters more.  There seems to be some
dim, secret ruling (perhaps in FISA) that says that it is legal to
intercept bits that pass through the US.

If I were the NSA, and I claim (without being able to prove the
negative) that I'm not, I would pursue the following strategy:

    1. find a way to tamper with foreign switches to route
communications through the US based facilities.  Easy - just send the
right routing-table updates - whether IP or SS7, this is pretty easy.

    2. install deep packet inspection equipment.  This is becoming COTS,
with sales to ISPs starting to drive costs down ane performance up.

    3. select and record into a high-performance RAID cluster.  COTS.

Same techniques work remarkably well for tapping and recording
competitor and economic target traffic.

Interesting thought.   To tap US-US communications, why not just route
the traffic out through Gitmo and back?   There also seems to be dim
secret rulings that allow spying on traffic that goes across the
border.   Supposedly the legal framework is about calls that "terminate"
outside the US.   But I'm sure that "terminate" can be carefully
redefined by good legal scholarship and a few pet lawyers in DoJ and DoD
to include something like storing on disk for one disk rotation (17
msec) and then resending it.

All hypothetically, of course.  :-)

David Farber wrote:
> ________________________________________
> From: Whitfield Diffie [whitfield.diffie () sun com]
> Sent: Monday, January 14, 2008 1:02 PM
> To: David Farber
> Subject: US fraction of world's traffic
>
>                                 Monday  14 January 2008  at 09:55
>
>     Have you yet been pestered with the following question:
>
>         Any chance you can help me discern the percentage of the world's
>         phone calls and e-mails that pass through U.S.-based equipment?
>
> This seems like an FCC or DoC sort of question that must have an oficial answer
> if you know where to look for it.  Do you know where it resides?
>
>
>                                         Whit
>
>
>
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