The NSA Program

[Tyler Durden]

John Young wrote...

>He fingers the international telecom hubs in NYC through
>which NSA grabs most of the data purposely sent through them
>to transoceanic cables worldwide. Hmm, the hubs on
>the West Coast are not mentoned. Wonder if that traffic is
>now redirected through New York too for easy watching.

I sincerely doubt that all of it can be. If anything, they have a local 
pre-sort that either discards low probability-of- interesting traffic or 
stores Variola suitcase-like it for periodic retreival or examination. 
Possibly, some of it will get routed through here (I say 'here' because out 
my window I see one of the big NYC COs). But if that's the case, look for 
very high bandwidth cross-country optical systems deployment with many 
wavelengths and lots of Raman as well as traditional optical amplification. 
Akin to what Corvis was building until they merged into Broadcom 
(hum...that's interesting if you think about it).

I also happen to know enough about how a lot of the long-distance telecom 
networks are setup, so I also doubt they'd want to backhaul that through NYC 
if they're in the beltway, or southish like that.

Then again, it's not impossible, and there can be very strong Operations 
reasons for moving traffic like that.

-TD