Edited to not be so flippant: I work in HFT/finance where recording all traffic is required I think by law and definitely for one's own sanity. We're able to maintain nanosecond trades while capturing ALL the traffic. It has zero impact on the traffic. This is normal, widely used tech. Think stuff like Ixia passive taps and/or Arista Metamako FPGA-based tap/mux devices.
I have. I have a background in high speed networking.
Have you ever paused for a moment to consider how much infrastructure would be required to send 80% of data on the internet across the country and into a single datacenter in Virginia?
If you've worked in HFT, you can probably at least start to imagine the scale we're talking about.
> Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA
Where are you getting this new 200 numbers? Share a source please.
“Loudoun County currently has 199 data centers, with another 117 in development, according to Michael Turner, vice chair of the board of supervisors transportation and land use committee and Ashburn’s district supervisor.”
https://virginiabusiness.com/loudoun-county-advances-changes...
Ashburn, VA is the data center capital of the world.
When you type and hit submit, even on this site, your data will hit one of those data centers.
The few exceptions are government networks and China.
Or are you saying that the NSA has a hidden tap on the equipment without my ISP knowing. How does that traffic get from the ISP router to the NSA?
I can believe IXPs in many countries will send netflow data to their state's intelligence org, but that's a long way from what was being suggested.
"Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in X"
Does not mean that all traffic goes through a single data center in X. Just that it goes through one of potentially many data centers that happen to be in X.
now.. could they just copy the traffic and send it to VA on a side channel? probably?
Instagram, YouTube, misc Web traffic, and torrents, with a side of minutae.
I'm certain the three letter agencies yearn for the days before letsencrypt was de facto.
A copy of the certificate and private keys won't help thanks to the magic of Diffie–Hellman, you can't passively (assuming you haven't got a practical quantum computer)
Your company will have deployed root certificates to devices and run as a MITM. This is standard corporate firewall behaviour.
That was 14 years ago…
We have MUCH more capabilities today.
I’m well aware of the historical surveillance programs. I’m asking for a source for all of your claims about what’s happening today regarding 80% of internet traffic.
As for traffic, I can’t cite numbers, you’ll just have to trust me when I say it. I can’t give you packet breakdown or IP4 vs IP6. To have that discussion requires a secret clearance at least.
I suspect many in DOGE were given high levels of security clearance based on their ability to create dank memes on x
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudoun_County,_Virginia#Econo...
And of course all the privately owned ones too. It is bananas. Not just because of government either - low ping times to the biggest population center of North America.
Neither would anybody have believed that 8 out of 10 hard drive chips can contain any rootkits. Yet, here we are, and the insanity of it is that we've found lots of malware attributed to EQGRP, and the Snowden leaks (from the perspective of Booz Allen) have confirmed it.
You should read up on quantum routing.
They don't have to route through any specific location if they can just infiltrate the routers of your neighbors. Any data packet from the originating server will arrive slower at your location than the data packet of your neighbor. In that scenario TLS becomes pretty useless if the CA itself is also exchangeable, because you can't rely on TCP or UDP. Ironically the push for UDP makes it much easier to implement in the underlying token ring architectures and their virtual routing protocols like VC4 and later.
That's how the internet and a star topology (or token ring topology on city level) was designed.
I haven't heard this before. Do you have any links I can read on this?
Check the snowden leaks for IRATEMONK and TAO (tailored access operations) related documents.
Nobody who understands the scale of the internet could possibly believe this is true.
Routing internet traffic through a geographical location would increase ping times by a noticeable amount.
Even sending traffic from around the world to a datacenter in VA would require an amount of infrastructure multiple times larger than the internet itself to carry data all that distance. All built and maintained in secret.