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.
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.