Breaking PRISM and friends

[grarpamp]

>> Combined with IPsec on those miles, or a vetted path if it's short
>> enough, you can reduce the amount of cable that personally-identifying
>> IP headers are sniffable on, from a few thousand miles, to perhaps a
>> couple of feet

According to the speed of light, anything under a certain maximum time
from you is local. If all you had was a list of nodes, RTT could be used
to determine a global path made up of small hops less likely to be directly
monitored themselves. Hop count would rise with longer paths and
performance drops... so perhaps only useful for creating local clusters.
TTL and RTT above a minimum time are spoofable so not nearly as useful.