If someone is transiting sensitive data without encryption over the internet, and the NSA is included in their threat model, then they need to rethink a lot of things.

Assuming the NSA catches and stores the traffic (i.e. it passed a keyword/subject filter), they still have to break the encryption.

And even if they have devices capable of doing so, they don't have capacity to do so on an unlimited volume of messages.

A dystopian system would be more interested in the metadata, which can't really be hidden. The Gestapo or STASI would work by making graphs of who was in communication with who, and then, they'd go kick down doors and round up everyone on their list for interrogation, because they were somehow connected to some bad person via the metadata. Of course, this would have a stifling effect on communication and lead to constant fear and paranoia in the general population, which is precisely what an authoritarian regime would want.

They're still pushing this stuff today, not surprisingly:

https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/NSA-director-pushes-C...

> "WASHINGTON (AP) (Jan 12 2023) — A top U.S. intelligence official on Thursday urged Congress to renew sweeping powers granted to American spy agencies to surveil and examine communications, saying they were critical to stopping terrorism, cyberattacks and other threats."

"Other threats" such as what, populist movements unhappy with the increasingly feudalist-aristocratic nature of the United States and the gross corruption seen in Congress and the federal bureaucracy?

Metadata is increasingly shifting into the encrypted payload, and networks are shifting away (conceptually and physically) from p2p channel-based to packet-routed via intermediaries.

At some point, the metadata is (user X talks to SaaS service Y), and then the trail goes private.

This is the NSA we’re talking about. They will simply put their hooks inside service Y and collect the data there.

The NSA isn't some all-powerful entity. They play by different rules, but there are still rules.

If ATT had really pushed back, the NSA would have been hard pressed to install and run tapping equipment. And that's on hardline voice, where CALEA obviously applies. But as far as I know ATT didn't really fight, once they were legally covered from liability.

The modern large scale cloud or social providers are younger companies, have fewer government ties, and (critically) have worldwide business.

I would automatically assume they all have data sharing agreements with the NSA, as a maximal threat assumption, but as a likely threat I expect it'd be a lot harder for the NSA to co-opt them.

I.e. why the NSA instead chose to tap Google's private fiber between their data centers

> If someone is transiting sensitive data without encryption over the internet, and the NSA is included in their threat model, then they need to rethink a lot of things.

You still think that the "security" certificates make you secure ? that s in https stands for security ?

Why would a spy agency collect TB of data without a mean to decrypt it ?

Encryption doesn't require certificate authorities and TLS.

And the NSA is doing that because they can break a percentage of it, or anticipate they can in the future.

And it's order of exabytes of data.