Re: government eavesdropping

[michael.dillon () gtsip net]

On Fri, 25 February 2000, owen () exodus net wrote:

> Except that for the most part, MAE connections are switched, not "shared"
> media.  As such, they'll see Broadcasts, and packets destined for the
> monitoring equipment and little else.  The aggregate bandwidth of the MAE
> makes them using a SPAN port virtually impossible.  If memory serves, the
> MAE traffic is several times 100Mbps.

SPAN ports were not always infeasible and certainly are quite
feasible at a lot of smaller exchange points. And all kinds of
things could be happening inside an ATM exchange. And the
spooks are happy to get any traffic at all; they don't need
100% of it and cannot get 100% of it in today's Internet 
structure. All they need is a little inside help to get great
piles of interesting traffic from taps within a large provider
or within an exchange point.

And there is still the possibility of tapping the fiber directly
at least two ways that I know of.

Governments spying on their citizenry is just a fact of life in the
modern age. The key thing is to make sure that they do not abuse 
this power or this data but that is politics, not technology.


---
Michael Dillon   Phone: +44 (20) 7769 8489   
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Director of Product Engineering, GTS IP Services
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