Re: US fraction of world's traffic

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

________________________________________
From: David P. Reed [dpreed () reed com]
Sent: Thursday, January 17, 2008 11:47 AM
To: Patrick W. Gilmore
Cc: David Farber
Subject: Re: [IP] US fraction of world's traffic

I didn't bring this up to "troll", but I certainly caught a fish!

Patrick W. Gilmore wrote:
> > Again, I think you misunderstand my point of what an agency of USG
> > can do covertly that a hacker with less resources can't do.   (e.g.
> > selling arms to the Iranians to fund the Contras, another clever hack
> > to make "legal" what Congress did not want to be seen authorizing).
>
> I think you misunderstand how the Internet & PSTN work.
Well, it's said to be foolish to teach your grandmother to suck eggs,
try it if you want.  Perhaps you don't know who I am. Google works.
:-)  [I'm always so curious about why people get pissed off when I point
out something they hadn't thought of.]
> The NSA has vast resources and can do many interesting quasi- and
> extra-legal tricks, but they neither congress nor any gov't agency can
> change or get around the laws of physics.  (Even if they try to
> legislate "Pi=3" every now and again. :)
Cute comment.   As someone who does physics, maybe you can teach me
something.  Which laws are you referring to?
> For instance, traffic from Beijing to Tokyo that goes through the US
> will have to deal with that pesky "speed of light" thing.  Extra
> latency is noticed.
Why would it go through CONUS?  All it has to do is go through a US
territory or US controlled place (i.e. gitmo).  There are closer US
territorial locations to Beijing/Tokyo, including some interesting bases
in Okinawa which are territorial in nature.  Wonder if they have fiber
passing through them?  In any case, I'm incredibly aware of speed of
light and queuing delays typical in today's technologies.  You can hide
a lot of speed-of-light delay in the queueing variation, and also in the
routing variations observed minute-to-minute].
> There there are problems like the router ports between networks.
> Changing routing changes traffic, and there is no way on the Internet
> to say "put the VoIP through the US, rest goes direct".  Router ports
> have physical constraints, the laser only flashes on & off so fast, no
> matter how hard the NSA tries.  Congestion and packet loss are
> noticed.  Etc., etc.
Well, well.  I suppose there is an all-knowing person who knows what
"normal" traffic looks like, so the difference would be easily sniffed
out. :-)  No ISP I know of (even the ones who do DPI at wirespeed in
places) can tell me what the sources and destinations of their traffic
are.  So if you noticed an increase in traffic through a router, to what
would you attribute it?  Traffic is growing real fast, and when it
grows, the carriers buy more equipment.   So guess what?  The ports get
more capacity.
> If the NSA wants to snoop something, it will be much easier to snoop
> in country than try to draw the traffic to the USofA.  I wouldn't make
> any prognostications about whether they can do that, because there I
> don't know if they can or not.  (Plus I can't think of any laws of
> physics it would break. :)
Of course to put an NSA monitoring station in, say, Venezuela or Somalia
or Pakistan or Indonesia would be trivial.  :-)  Just pretend it's an
oil drilling platform that needs a lot of fiber routed through it?

But as I said.  I don't claim to work for NSA.

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