Private post Morten: The NSA middleware we are required to run (that took time to deploy to each of our social partners) is breaking something so let’s revert.

Public post Mortem:

Entirely believable technical cause.

Alternate Post Mortem: Cyber WWIII's first public skirmishes become visible...

(Ignore Stuxnet, Ignore DUQU)

/me puts on tin foil hat

It's the rice grain implants, man

yeah I wonder

I imagine the NSA uses an optical tap device. These devices create identical copies and require no power or management.

That's why it's called PRISM. It's exactly what you describe. Splitting an optical signal into 2 using, basically, a prism. One signal goes out to the net as normal, the other goes to their own datacenters, that they keep continually building and expanding. The newer ones are being build on military bases, for added security. Check em out. Look at the size and cost of them. Some are over a million sq. ft. That's a lot of data. They measure it in terms of zottabytes and zettabytes (in 2013, a lifetime ago in terms of storage space):

https://modernsurvivalblog.com/government-gone-wild/nsa-loca...

http://worldstopdatacenters.com/government-data-centers/

Nah, PRISM referred to the front door for lawful access to customer records under warrant. That's the sort of portal that China once hacked Gmail by gaining access to.. the companies explicitly built those access relays.

The beam splitter stuff (e.g. Room 641A) went by different codenames, TRAFFICTHIEF and TURMOIL iirc. That's the back door.

> The newer ones are being build on military bases, for added security.

IIRC, the NSA is organizationally part of the military, and it's currently headed by a military officer who gives congressional testimony in his uniform (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMi241XLeQ8). It makes sense they'd build on military bases, it'd be kinda weird if they didn't.

No, it was called MUSCULAR. PRISM is different.

Also, the majority of tech and data companies have closed this loophole by encrypting traffic between data centers. Nobody thought it was necessary to do it before over dark fiber before because, hey, who was listening? (answer: the NSA was)

I wonder if they publish their drive failure rates like BackBlaze? 5 Eyes tax payers and all.

One of my coworkers came from a large telecom. He mentioned they had to get technology from an Israeli firm that specializes in quantum cryptography on the fiber optic line to fend of NSA and GCHQ, who are apparently worse than NSA. (iirc) the tech apparently encrypts data streams on one side and check to see if the hash is the same on the other side, if somethings off (evidence of tamper) it instantly changes the cipher.

And they have been using the USS Jimmy Carter sub with the front huge cable splice bay for decades to compromise all undersea cables.

>>>The New York Times reported in 2005 that the USS Jimmy Carter, a highly advanced submarine that was the only one of its class built, had a capability to tap undersea cables. An Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers report speculated that a 45-foot extension added to the Jimmy Carter provided this capability by allowing engineers to bring the cable up into a floodable chamber to install a tap. But it is unlikely that the USS Jimmy Carter routinely taps cables since U.S. intelligence agencies can much more easily (and lawfully) obtain cable data through taps at above-ground cable landing stations.

https://www.lawfareblog.com/evaluating-russian-threat-unders...

I wonder how Jimmy Carter feels about his namesake being used to wiretap the world?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2014/03...

It was a known FU to carter...

But the USS Jimmy Carter launched in 2004:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter

I don't think he made any pre-Snowden comments on mass surveillance?

Optical tap for unauthorized access, but surely port mirrors for the national-security-letter stuff. Wouldn't make sense to go through the hassle of a tap install and the ongoing risk of it failing, versus using a capability available on almost all serious switching hardware to give you a guaranteed 1:1.

They would still need the encryption keys since Google encrypts their inter-data center fiber

interesting that facebooks cavalrylogger is still being sucessfully injected despite their being nothing but a blank page also interesting that cavalrylogger has a function that lets you bind key-presses to callbacks even more interesting is that cavalrylogger seems to come prepackaged with any facebook like button! cheers for the keylogger facebook

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4188605/what-is-cavalryl...

Alternative post mortem (blind): Massive power outage

Yet another alternative: Third World War has just started, and this was the first battle.

I don't think it's the NSA this time, for once they don't have to do deep package analysis or install any MITM device since they get the whole info in bulk, maybe it's just a 400-pound hacker.

I've never understood the 400 pound hacker thing. Does it refer to body weight or technical prowess?

I spontaneously took it as a loose analogy to dominant male gorillas and the extent to which they need to be taken seriously.

It's the stereotype that "hackers" are obese, chugging mountain dew and living in their parents basement.

The 400-pound hacker is a reference to what Trump said during the 2016 campaign but it seems like not everybody gets it.

Remember when youtube was down for like six hours a few months ago and we still haven't heard why?

Yeh why was that? I kept wondering when we'd hear. I've got bets to collect on!

Curious of they did it due to a kernel exploit being used by a nation state bad enough that it was worth YOLO patching.

there are actively people downvoting such comments. I guess that's suspicious too.