To put it succinctly, this legislation was not motivated by the desire to do something new, but just to not catch legal trouble for doing it. -TD

Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2008 08:46:28 +0100 From: eugen@leitl.org To: info@postbiota.org; cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net Subject: [IP] US fraction of world's traffic

----- Forwarded message from David Farber <dave@farber.net> -----

From: David Farber <dave@farber.net> Date: Tue, 15 Jan 2008 17:28:52 -0800 To: ip <ip@v2.listbox.com> Subject: [IP] US fraction of world's traffic Reply-To: 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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