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The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities

theintercept.com

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Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities

#111

Post by puzzle »

oldgeezr wrote: post #101
puzzle wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a difference between a data center and a POP. The former is very large. The latter is usually a rack or more in someone else's facilities. When you try to reach Google or Facebook, you rarely hit their data centers directly. They're out in the boonies, where land and power are cheap. Rather, you talk to their proxies at the edge (POPs, often in large cities). From there, your data is either returned immediate…

Just curious, is there a good site/book/etc to learn how the modern internet actually works? As a lowly programmer, I have a good understanding of network communications, and some knowledge of things like routing protocols, but I'm completely lost when it comes to understanding how the modern internet actually functions. Thanks!

I'd normally recommend books like Google's SRE one, but at least in this case it glosses over the detail of where GFEs tend to live:

https://landing.google.com/sre/book/chapters/production-envi...

It used to be the case that they were mostly in POPs, but I think that with Maglev (https://research.google.com/pubs/pub44824.html) they can live in core clusters, too. Other Google sources go into more detail, e.g.

https://medium.com/@duhroach/profiling-gcps-load-balancers-9...

https://www.slideshare.net/MichelleHolley1/google-cloud-netw...

Back to your question, I'm not sure there is one good place to look up these things, but presentations/papers by companies like Google and Facebook are probably still your best bet. Stuff coming straight out of GCP teams will be a little more enthusiastic in tone, but that's easy to tune out. :-)

Another good example is Facebook's Ben Maurer and his Fail at Scale talk, which discusses a lot of details that are necessary for modern internet services, such as queuing, session/application-layer congestion control, canarying, advanced monitoring, etc. https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2839461

Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities

#112

Post by notadoc »

kodablah wrote: post #6

One wonders if a CDN might advertise, "we promise once your data enters our network at our edge locations outside of the US, it does not traverse any AT&T networks while reaching your server inside the US". Same with cloud companies' private networks across regions.

I would be surprised if it was not every network, in every country, so trying to avoid a single network is unlikely to do much.

Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities

#113

Post by kodablah »

lev99 wrote: post #42
kodablah wrote: post #6

One wonders if a CDN might advertise, "we promise once your data enters our network at our edge locations outside of the US, it does not traverse any AT&T networks while reaching your server inside the US". Same with cloud companies' private networks across regions.

If your communication is encrypted it shouldn't matter if it passes AT&T networks. Either A. Popular and well known encryption algorithms are not broken by the NSA, and your communication is private. B. Popular and well known encryption algorithms are broken by the NSA, but the fact that it's broken is top secret and the state will not do any actions that revel the secret. Your communications are not safe, and while…

> If your communication is encrypted it shouldn't matter if it passes AT&T networks.

That assumes metadata is irrelevant. The destination, time of day, and volume of the traffic all have value separately and especially so when together. The destination can be masked if you control both sides and AT&T is a go between, but timing issues are subject to analysis unless you are a large enough player to give safety in numbers or you push noise across your pipes.

Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities

#115

Post by pjc50 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #68
pjc50 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a secret in the West, or even in China, that there's a "Great Firewall" which surveils and regulates all internet access. It's just America that pretends it doesn't have a secret police.

> a secret police The term "secret police refers to intelligence, security or police agencies that engage in covert operations against a government's political opponents" [1]. We have no evidence the NSA is "used to protect the political power of an individual" or even political party. They're an intelligence agency, purely and simply. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_police

I believe COINTELPRO is now firmly in the realm of "documented fact" rather than "conspiracy theory"? That was the FBI though.

More recently e.g. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/11/judge-orders-fbi-cia-...

Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities

#116

Post by AndrewKemendo »

schoen wrote: post #110
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't metadata, practically speaking, a subset of content? Importantly to how we think about communication, no. Metadata is the signature that accompanies or encapsulates content, viewable to the world. You can completely conceal content, through encryption for example, but you can't completely conceal metadata. In other words there must be a physical exchange of energy somewhere (communication), and metadata tells y…

> you can't completely conceal metadata You can do it with a very high cost (in overhead, latency, and availability) by having a large number of people all send and receive messages, on a fixed or randomized schedule, exceeding their maximum possible amount of communication with one another. Then someone monitoring the network knows that each of the participants in this system could have communicated with any other p…

Even ignoring the practicality part, it becomes a timing game, because "empty" messages - even if they were filled with unintelligible "random" hex - would traverse the network differently than ones with variable length/size content and would be able to be filtered out pretty quickly.

The bottom line is that you are going to leave a signature of some sort through communications - the question is, can you properly build a comms system system that is functional within the limits of your risk/reward criteria.

Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities

#117

Post by jeffwilcox »

closeparen wrote: post #103
stephengillie wrote: post #84

The Seattle location - 1122 3rd Ave - is an interesting spot. According to Google Maps[0], next door is the FBI Seattle Division office. On street view, the building itself has a street-level office with signs for both AT&T and CenturyLink. 3rd Ave itself is slightly notorious - hosting the surface entrances for the Seattle bus tunnel, and a large number of inter-city routes, the area has a reputation for crime and t…

It seems odd to have an ISP office in the middle of downtown?

Fiber hotels are in all the big cities, Westin Building Exchange on 5th Ave in Seattle is where a ton of peering also happens.

Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities

#118

Post by chrissnell »

kodablah wrote: post #6

One wonders if a CDN might advertise, "we promise once your data enters our network at our edge locations outside of the US, it does not traverse any AT&T networks while reaching your server inside the US". Same with cloud companies' private networks across regions.

I'd rather go up against the US Government over illegal monitoring, where at least you have some form of due process, than many other countries.

Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities

#119

Post by cirgue »

pjc50 wrote: post #30
azinman2 wrote: post #2

I’d love to see the intercept publish the equivalent for China, Russia, etc. It feels the press has very overindexed into the NSA.

It's not a secret in the West, or even in China, that there's a "Great Firewall" which surveils and regulates all internet access. It's just America that pretends it doesn't have a secret police.

Are you implying that people believe the US doesn't have an intelligence community that engages in covert surveillance?

In the past few years, the debate seems to have shifted from "What is appropriate oversight and behavior for intelligence agencies" to "Literally all national-level intelligence operations are a crime which must be stopped". The difference between the US and China/Russia is that in theory we have an intelligence community that is answerable for its actions to an elected civilian government. The extent to which that is true is obviously debatable, but to try to draw some equivalency here is absurd.

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