Back in they day, it is claimed they could only store 20 TB a day, but technology has improved considerably... but so have data volumes. I wonder if they can store more content for longer now or if the volumes have increased too much.
XKeyscore
41–50 of 117 posts
Re: XKeyscore
#42Re: XKeyscore
#43How relevant is this (and the NSA's general spying capability) in 2025? We hear a lot about local agencies perusing the services of private companies to collect citizens' data in the US, whether that's traffic information, IoT recordings, buying information from FAANG, etc. What's the NSA's position in the current administration? (e.g. we've heard a lot of noise in the past about the FBI and CIA getting the cold shou…
NSAs collection capabilities have been greatly degraded. They can no longer read all internet traffic, basically everything is encrypted now. NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption.
You should read about Project Cloudflare
Re: XKeyscore
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
NSAs collection capabilities have been greatly degraded. They can no longer read all internet traffic, basically everything is encrypted now. NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption.
>NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption. They don't. But they have other options. For example, Cloudflare is an American company that has plaintext access to the traffic of many sites. Cloudflare can be compelled to secretly share anything the NSA want.
>Cloudflare can be compelled to secretly share anything the NSA want.
This is true given some possible interpretations, false given other possible interpretations. Cloudflare can be secretly compelled to share specific things, there's no legal mechanism to compel Cloudflare to share everything.
Re: XKeyscore
#45How relevant is this (and the NSA's general spying capability) in 2025? We hear a lot about local agencies perusing the services of private companies to collect citizens' data in the US, whether that's traffic information, IoT recordings, buying information from FAANG, etc. What's the NSA's position in the current administration? (e.g. we've heard a lot of noise in the past about the FBI and CIA getting the cold shou…
NSAs collection capabilities have been greatly degraded. They can no longer read all internet traffic, basically everything is encrypted now. NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption.
Israel produced Pegasus for hacking smartphones and taking them over. You don't think NSA can do that? They control all the endpoints they want.
Re: XKeyscore
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
NSAs collection capabilities have been greatly degraded. They can no longer read all internet traffic, basically everything is encrypted now. NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption.
1) They don't necessarily need to break all encryption, just knowing who is talking to who and then delivering a tailored payload is their M.O.; The Tailored Access Operations division exists just for this. 2) They didn't build a Yottabyte-scale datacenter for no reason 3) They have the capability to compromise certificate authorities. Pinned certs aren't universal. 4) Speculation, but, Snowden's revelations probably…
None of your proposed solutions are stealthy enough to enable bulk collection at a pre-Snowden scale.
Yeah, they can still collect lots of useful metadata.
Re: XKeyscore
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes but I wouldn't say their capabilities have been "greatly" degraded. It's still very much in the "push a button and have someone's entire life history up on the screen" territory. Degraded would be "it is impossible for them to know anything about people unless they send dozens of human agents to stalk them".
I think going from "lol we can read and store all the emails sent by everybody" to "lol we can hack any specific person and then read their emails" indicates a massive loss of capability. The first approach enabled them to find targets that were not on their radar based on message contents, they can no longer do that.
They still read emails. No doubt they're inside Google, Microsoft, Apple. They might not be inside Proton Mail, it uses PGP but keys are stored server side so I wouldn't know.
No doubt they still read texts. I think the US is still among the countries that use SMS a lot.
They no doubt have access to the data big tech's mined out of the entire world's population. That capability alone puts them into "bring everything about this guy up on the screen" territory.
Re: XKeyscore
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
NSAs collection capabilities have been greatly degraded. They can no longer read all internet traffic, basically everything is encrypted now. NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption.
They surely don't have any kind of access to letsencrypt root certs whatsoever
You can't decrypt anything with letsencrypt root certs, you can issue your own certificates but it would be impossible to use those at any significant scale.
It's also worth considering that CT makes it extremely noisy to use such certificates to attack web browsers.
Re: XKeyscore
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
NSAs collection capabilities have been greatly degraded. They can no longer read all internet traffic, basically everything is encrypted now. NSA does not have magic tools to break modern encryption.
Israel produced Pegasus for hacking smartphones and taking them over. You don't think NSA can do that? They control all the endpoints they want.
So what? They can't do that at scale without making a ton of noise.
That's a very boring capability compared to what they were able to do pre-Snowden. That's also not a new capability, they were able to do that pre-Snowden too.
Re: XKeyscore
#50Back in they day, it is claimed they could only store 20 TB a day, but technology has improved considerably... but so have data volumes. I wonder if they can store more content for longer now or if the volumes have increased too much.
I'm sure they can store far more than 20 TB now, but it is true that the content pool is much larger. I would guess it's not a favorable ratio.