Email tapping by ISPs, forwarder addresses, and crypto proxies

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, Jul 18, 2004 at 05:55:02AM -0500, J.A. Terranson wrote:

> Now, *mirroring* to a couple of choke points, sure, but then you ave
> transit and other associated costs (you gotta haul the data to all of the
> collectors).

I was thinking about a box at each incoming/outgoing point with a NIC in
passive mode. Filtered traffic is a tiny fraction of total, and should be
easy to send to a central location (I presume because it's feasible to
process and store world's entire relevant text traffic in a pretty small
central facility, no one is going to bother with true distributed processing;
though filtering at the periphery already qualifies as such).

Otoh, presence of a number of such boxes is goign to need a gag order, and a
really major ISP. Small shops are too informal to be able to hide something
like that.

> Just not feasible to do it quietly.  Note, I said quietly.

Hardware required for tapping major arteries is going to need modified
high-end routers (filtering of cloned traffic), no? I don't see how
this is going to be a limit on organization of the size of NSA & consorts.

--
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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