First, I must immediately question the informativeness of anyone who thinks Washington DC is located in Maryland. Second, pointing out addresses of major AT&T PoPs is useless. Do carriers (still) mirror traffic to intelligence agencies? Most likely. However, this makes it sound like AT&T and the NSA have dedicated entire buildings for this purpose, which is ridiculous. Complete sensationalism.
The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
11–20 of 192 posts
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#12First, I must immediately question the informativeness of anyone who thinks Washington DC is located in Maryland. Second, pointing out addresses of major AT&T PoPs is useless. Do carriers (still) mirror traffic to intelligence agencies? Most likely. However, this makes it sound like AT&T and the NSA have dedicated entire buildings for this purpose, which is ridiculous. Complete sensationalism.
This first thing you said isn't in the article at all, you just misread it.
The second thing also indicates a lack of reading comprehension, thus downvoted.
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#13I’d love to see the intercept publish the equivalent for China, Russia, etc. It feels the press has very overindexed into the NSA.
well good luck trying on those countries!
with PRC operating quick-death-"police"-vans, aren't you telling the intercept reporters to risk their lives?
maybe you should try...?
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#14The scrolljacking on this article is absolutely insufferable.
It happens a lot on The Intercept. It's really super annoying.
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#15First, I must immediately question the informativeness of anyone who thinks Washington DC is located in Maryland. Second, pointing out addresses of major AT&T PoPs is useless. Do carriers (still) mirror traffic to intelligence agencies? Most likely. However, this makes it sound like AT&T and the NSA have dedicated entire buildings for this purpose, which is ridiculous. Complete sensationalism.
This first thing you said isn't in the article at all, you just misread it. The second thing also indicates a lack of reading comprehension, thus downvoted.
Please, explain to me how I misread the map. It clearly labels Washington DC as a city in the state of Maryland.
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#16One 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.
Couldn't the NSA start working with other ISPs than AT&T? I'd really like to see CDNs like CloudFlare start requiring Cloud Origin encryption; e.g. what CloudFlare calls "Full SSL" -- https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200170416-W... . Right now, you can do TLS termination ("Flexible SSL"), which end-users aren't aware of -- they see a padlock -- and I'm sure the NSA doesn't mind.
Sure they could, but one might hope the AT&T's eroded trust would serve as caution towards other overly cooperative companies. Or encourage companies to fight in court to be given the transparency allowances they desire to let the rest of us know they are legally compelled to do this and in no way do they agree or are doing anything beyond what's required.
Granted, like FB issues and others, we in this community need to realize that most users simply don't care (even many b2b ones) and not get upset when our users don't move their dollars on principle. For us it's a big deal, for many there are real, harmful issues going on in the world and volume collection of data by companies and governments is not one of them. And we can't make it so despite the deluge of articles by a supportive mass media.
EDIT: To clarify, you mentioned "other ISPs" but I want to be clear I'm talking about private pipes and not residential internet though I know they are often shared.
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#17I’d love to see the intercept publish the equivalent for China, Russia, etc. It feels the press has very overindexed into the NSA.
Why? Because this hurts your sense of national pride?
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#18It could just be part of regular routing, but I noticed for example that all my facebook traffic is routed to an address with an LA prefix in LA. That doesn't seem strange except that Facebook doesn't have an LA datacenter (at least not that I could find any public record of, and they seem to publish the location of other data centers).
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#19I’d love to see the intercept publish the equivalent for China, Russia, etc. It feels the press has very overindexed into the NSA.
If you tried in China or Russia you'd probably get a nice visit to a permanent-stay "resort" with "daily exercise" where you get to work in fields without pay
Re: The NSA’s Hidden Spy Hubs in Eight U.S. Cities
#20It could just be part of regular routing, but I noticed for example that all my facebook traffic is routed to an address with an LA prefix in LA. That doesn't seem strange except that Facebook doesn't have an LA datacenter (at least not that I could find any public record of, and they seem to publish the location of other data centers).
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 immediately (e.g. cached objects such as popular videos or the company logo...) or forwarded over their fiber to the core clusters in the data centers.