whistle-blower outs NSA spy-room

Tyler Durden camera_lumina at hotmail.com
Sat Apr 8 08:23:11 PDT 2006


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 <justin-cypherpunks at soze.net>
>To: cypherpunks at 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.





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