Re: whistle-blower outs NSA spy-room

That single little Wired article told me more about NSA's network than I've heard or read anywhere else. It should be proudly pointed out that we Cypherpunks correctly reverse-engineered most of these details some months ago. For me the main conclusion is: "They can't get everything." Not even a very powerful Variola's Suitcase could do the job. They have to do some statistical pre-sort of traffic and then route the more likely calls/etc...into NSA's own Fiber network, where backend equipment does several more layers of pre-sort to determine urgency and then perhaps store the rest. I'd still bet that we'll see the NSA "fall back" upon the fact that humans don't actually read most of the traffic they scoop up. They probably only open up high-risk domestic communications, but by then merely knowing they have something (and knowing its source and destination) is going to be 90% as good as actually having a human read it. So this legal avenue is unlikely to put anyone meaningful in jail. OTOH, it shows that the parastic NSA network is possibly far more vulnerable than most people imagine. -TD

From: Justin To: cypherpunks@jfet.org Subject: Re: whistle-blower outs NSA spy-room Date: Sat, 8 Apr 2006 10:53:29 +0000

On 2006-04-08T05:48:32-0400, R. A. Hettinga wrote:

...

At 10:11 AM +0200 4/8/06, Eugen Leitl wrote:

...

Whistle-Blower Outs NSA Spy Room

Source?

URL?

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70619-0.html

Ryan Singel's blog: http://www.secondaryscreening.net/

-- The six phases of a project: I. Enthusiasm. IV. Search for the Guilty. II. Disillusionment. V. Punishment of the Innocent. III. Panic. VI. Praise & Honor for the Nonparticipants.