Variola wrote... Dark fiber. "Dark Fiber" ain't a talisman you merely wave at data to get it to magically move to where you want it to.You've got to LIGHT that fiber, and to light that fiber you need LOTS and LOTS of power-hungry, space-occupying equipment. In other words, you'd need to duplicate a significant fraction of the current public transport network. And that can't be done in one location, you'd need this shadow network to have either it's own COs all over the country, or to have significant POPs in practically every CO in the country. And I can tell you unequivocally that neither are the case. What this points to is CALEA + Grooming + Massive Optical Transport for offline sifting in a few centralized locations. And I strongly suspect that the recent GIG-BE contract is precisely the massive optical part. What I get from what you've pointed out, however, is that processing power isn't the limitation any longer. If they COULD get it ALL, then they probably would. So perhaps that's just a matter of time (ULH systems can move lots of traffic very long distances these days, with only the occasional optical amplifier.) -TD

From: "Major Variola (ret)" <mv@cdc.gov> To: "cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net" <cypherpunks@al-qaeda.net> Subject: Re: Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies Date: Tue, 20 Jul 2004 21:00:49 -0700

At 10:12 AM 7/19/04 -0400, Tyler Durden wrote:

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"Gimme an intel IXA network processor and no problem. ATM is fixed size data, not as tricky as IP decoding. Predicatable bandwidth. Stream all into megadisks, analyze later."

I'm gonna have to challenge this bit here, Variola.

Please. Truth requires skepticism. Be bold.

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Let's back up. You've got an OC-48 or OC-192 fiber and you want to grab ALL of the data in this fiber. Now I'll grant that in real life there's going to be a lot telephony circuit in there, but let's take a worst-case and assume you need ALL the data.

As cryptographers, we must assume this.

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What's in this OC-192? Right now it definitely ain't 10Gb/s of packets. It's going to have LOTS of DS1s, DS3s and, if you're lucky, and STS-3c or two. So you'll need to first of all demux ALL of the tributaries.

And how much *dark fiber* is there? Lots and lots, thanks to irrational

exuberance. Guess what? SiO2 doesn't care which direction the beam is pumped into.

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Next, you've got to un-map any ATM in each of the DS1s, etc, and then pull out the IP data from the ATM cells, remembering to reassemble fragmented packets (and there will be plenty with ATM). And remember, you may have to do this for 5000 simultaneous DS1s.

Yawn.

You underestimate the Adversary. Never ever do that. Isn't there some chink who wrote that?

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Oh, and let's not forget pointer adjustments.

Oh no, not pointers! What next, MPLS?

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And that's just one fiber. How will you actually get all of this traffic back to HQ? Remember, it keeps coming and won't stop.

Dark fiber.

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No, I think I'm becomming convinced that they can't yet get ALL of it.

Enjoy your childhood while it lasts. Its a beautiful time.

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