You think there's an entire shadow infrastructure across the United States or world that carries 80% of all internet traffic all the way to VA?

It would have to be several times larger than the internet infrastructure itself due to the distances involved.

All built and maintained in secret?

No. That isn't required at all. Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

> Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume

No, I understand networking hardware quite well actually. I'm also familiar with Room 641A. Room 641A did not capture 80% of internet traffic. If you think 80% of internet traffic could be routed through Room 641A you're not thinking about the infrastructure required to get it all there. It was a targeted operation on backbone lines that were right there.

While the most well known, there are other points of presence doing the same thing. Easy and trivial to duplicate traffic at line speed. It doesn't affect the traffic flow itself.

They will never believe you until you show them and that requires a clearance.

A decent number of people reading this probably do have secret clearance. But that's not really the relevant point.

Simply having secret clearance doesn't mean you can just go digging around arbitrary secret classified info that you have no business reading. And it certainly doesn't mean that discussion can be had on hackernews.

No need for a clearance, merely explain that

1. fibre-optic traffic is a beam of light

2. this beam can be passed through a glass prism…

3. the prism splits off say 20% of the light by intensity

4. this 20% is identical to the 80%

5. both the 20% and 80% component are 'bright' enough to be used

6. the 80% continues on its merry way, the 20% is redirected for 'other' uses.

That is simplifying it to the point of a lab experiment. It’s a bit more complicated but yes, you can split light and route that light anywhere you want.

Yes you can trivially tap a fibre -- https://www.gigamon.com/products/access-traffic/network-taps... for example

You can even do this without breaking the fibre

What you can't do is ship 80% of the traffic across the world to the US without either the ISPs agreeing, and thus a conspiracy of thousands of people in thousands of ISPs, or doing it outside the data centres, meaning millions of taps in various ducts around the globe, which would be found on a daily basis.

You just don't have imagination. Google, just by itself, controls 89% of the traffic in the Internet. And we know that the government can get any information they want from them, without even asking too much. If you combine this with other major companies operating very close to the US government, it is probable that more than 95% of the web traffic outside China that is easily within reach of these sinister 3 letter organizations.

> Google, just by itself, controls 89% of the traffic in the Internet.

This is completely false and it should be obvious to anyone thinking about it critically.

Are you confusing search engine query share with internet traffic?