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A comment on Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an apparent outage. Parent comment

Re:Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an appare... by cronix on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @03:30PM (#19382666)
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/

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Re:Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an appare... by sterlind on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @03:55PM (#19383002)
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.

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Re:Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an appare... by tivert on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @04:06PM (#19383152)
> 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.

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Re:Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an appare... by bduerst on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @05:11PM (#19383844)
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)

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Re:Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an appare... by newaccoutnas on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @03:45PM (#19382875)
I wonder if they publish their drive failure rates like BackBlaze? 5 Eyes tax payers and all.
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Re:Facebook, Instagram go down around the world in an appare... by propogandist on Wednesday March 13, 2019 @07:13PM (#19384935)
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.
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