http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
And are funneling all of the traffic to a datacenter in Utah with "yottabyte" scale capacity, with the goal of having enough capacity to archive the data for 100 years:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/al...
The NSA whistleblower who disclosed the project to the public was the person who wrote the backend of the system, which was originally designed for foreign data collection only. The NSA later repurposed the system for domestic data collection too. The goal, according to him, is to build models of every single person in the country, model the social graph, and be able to classify people as potential threats.
Another example of government waste and redundancy. We already have Facebook for this!
AT&T is just one of ~15 Tier 1 providers, never mind large number of tier 2 providers that carry the majority of internet traffic. There would need to be 1-10 such rooms in every NFL city and metro area in the US to do that owing to peering (public & private) and regional traffic. IMO that's simply too big of a undertaking to happen in secrecy.
Far more likely that it happened to be a handy place to watch traffic from transpacific cables or non-US IP traffic from non-US Tier 1. Actually, going by 10-20 sites I'd put my money on spying on non-US Tier 1 provider traffic.
His claim is that Stellar Wind was originally designed specifically for foreign intelligence gathering, then repurposed by the NSA to do domestic spying. Domestic spying was his motivation for leaving the NSA and becoming a whistleblower in the first place.
The fact that a program has the capability to process certain information does not have any bering on whether or not the information is actually capable of being collected and delivered to the program.
I guess it depends on how broadly one defines "all the Internet traffic they can get their hands on". I'm saying they can't get their hands on that much, and what they can, based on the reported locations of other intercept rooms, could be legitimately foreign traffic at points where foreign providers peer.
So far as tapping any significant portion of US internet traffic goes, a large portion of the entities on this list: ftp://ftp.arin.net/info/asn.txt would have to be in on it.
Actually, going by 10-20 sites I'd put my money on spying
on non-US Tier 1 provider traffic.
Based on what you'd have to do to capture foreign traffic as opposed to US traffic it makes sense that the Room 641A sites are intended to capture foreign traffic. All the public information supports this. There isn't any public disclosure of the type of infrastructure needed to comprehensively monitor US IP traffic.
If they are trying to capture foreign IP traffic there would need to be a intercept device where the foreign network interconnects with the US networks and where cables land. Large foreign providers tend to have 20 or fewer IP POPs in the US clustered in the same places. Look at networks maps from Tata, ReTN, NTT, etc. You will see many of the same locations. To tap them you'd put a intercept site in Seattle, Bay Area, Chicago, Miami, New York, and Virginia. Maybe Atlanta & Texas.
By the nature of the internet US traffic would get caught in that. E.g. ReTN had too much inbound traffic so they sold a college in Chicago some cheap outbound traffic. Now ReTN loses a router and their peering goes down so the bits to that college get hauled out to Europe and back. Bits just got captured. ThinThread (Binney's program) reportedly accounted for that and would mask US person PII pending a court order to decrypt it.
The fact that Trailblazer doesn't mask PII is a issue, but both programs would have captured US person PII, the difference is the addition of a bureaucratic hoop that the current and past administration would order jumped in a heartbeat. It isn't like ThinThread required a FISA Judge to walk over with a crypto token and descramble the data.
The nature of the problem means some US traffic will be caught but that does not make it a domestic spying program.
Unlike many other countries with a domestic internet surveillance regime (Syria, Egypt, Iran just to name a few) the US does not mandate that traffic pass through the national carrier or otherwise limit connections within its borders. Syria can drop in a few Blue Coat boxes and catch everything. In the US you'd need thousands, if not tens of thousands of intercept devices -- one or more for every edge in the graph of ASs (http://www.caida.org/research/topology/as_core_network/). It is not a insurmountable problem but it would take a act of Congress (likely challenged to the Supreme Court) and the cooperation of a lot of people to implement. It would not happen overnight or in secret.
Now, US providers are required to support CALEA but that is targeted at individual subscribers and most manufacturer implementations aren't suited to wholesale spying.
This isn't to say 641A sites couldn't work in hand with CALEA, just that it would be a bit more legit than "omg nsa taps all the wires". E.g. 641A could be watching traffic to/from a Jihadi site hosted in France without a court order under the Protect America Act of 2007. NSA notes someone from a US IP has been posting things that indicate radicalization. NSA passes it to FBI to check out. FBI gets a court order for a CALEA tap for the US IP. FBI sends order for tap to ISP. No wholesale tapping of US traffic is necessary. Of course in this example watching anything to/from the US without a FISA order is likely not kosher prior to PAA hence the warrantless surveillance controversy.
When fearmongering over home-grown lone wolf terrorism get louder, that's when the real trouble starts (except they probably have all the info needed for that over the counter from TransUnion etc).
And what are your credentials, exactly? Did you work for the NSA? Is there some reason I should believe you over an NSA whistleblower? As far as I can tell you're just guessing, and your guesses disagree with someone with insider knowledge.
Putting taps on undersea cables is risky. Cables are closely monitored and quite frequently are owned by multi-country consortiums so if you don't want a party to the consortium to find out you might not want to stick a tap in the landing station. Also, you might only care about public IP traffic and not want to see piles of corporate MPLS traffic. I'm not saying that's what happened, just that there are valid reasons why tapping fiber coming into the country wouldn't be desirable.
It is entirely possible that you are claiming a "there exists" and I'm arguing against a "for every". I'm sure we both agree that there exists a NSA program that happens to intercept some US traffic. That's what Binney and others have claimed. I'm arguing that going beyond that isn't supported by the leaks OR the nature of the internet.
I run operations at small regional Tier 2 ISP/transport provider with 25 provider edges on that AS graph that I mentioned before. I've personally installed, repaired, or inspected all cable and gear that 12 of those links traverse end to end and there weren't any secret spy boxes. So, no, I'm not just guessing. I can guarantee that quite a few people aren't having their bits snarfed wholesale when they email (local ISP mail to school mail), post on locally hosted community forums, or reserve a book at their local library.
My network may be too small to matter, but any comprehensive intercept regime would require myself and every other Tier 2 (transit + unpaid peering) ISP to cooperate.
More detail of the theoretical system: http://personofinterest.wikia.com/wiki/The_Machine
Fixed that for you.
You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. Since Smith v. Maryland (1979) the standard has been that you don't have an expectation of privacy in the records of the calls you make (as opposed to the content of those calls), on the grounds that you necessarily share that information with the phone company. This is analogous to not having any expectation of privacy on the street, eg which friends you choose to visit or which places you go that could be observed by third parties, or the lack of privacy in who mail letters to, which information is shared with the post office.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_v._Maryland)
Now in 2006 Congress decided that consumers should have such privacy after all, and amended the telecommunications act of 1934 to make it illegal for phone companies to sell or share subscribers' call data, but that law contains a broad exception for law enforcement and intelligence gathering activity.
http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-109hr4709enr/pdf/BILLS-10...
Here's a good (non-jargon) summary of the arguments on both sides from late last year: http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/10/03/50935.htm From the legal standpoint, it's important to bear this context in mind, rather than assuming the current situation is the result of massive overreach by this administration, or the government since 9-11. The fact is that the NSA of today sits atop foundations dating from from the Cold War
By chance I picked up a 70s spy novel at a thrift store the other day, and it's all about Soviet sleeper agents hidden in the US and activated by coded messages in telephone calls - the heroes are in a race against time to pinpoint the origin of the calls and interrupt the planned sequence of events. I happened to notice the book because I remembered being scared of the movie trailer as a kid since it seemed to suggest that calling the wrong number could result in a violent death (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Qg0w8qbBQo). So in the book the author was clearly worried about the openness of US society providing America's enemies with the tools of its own destruction - not unlike today's anxieties over cyber-warfare - and there's an implicit argument that high speed communications infrastructure is too powerful a force multiplier not to be under government supervision. Agree or not, it presented a surprisingly prescient understanding of asymmetrical warfare, to the point of seeming like domestic propaganda.
I mention this not to justify current NRA data collection, but to offer some historical context for how the law came to be the way it is. Too often, privacy discussions on HN are pendant on mythical notions of privacy being considered sacred until very recently. Historically (and going back all the way to the country's founding) the scope of the 4th amendment has been a lot narrower than people imagine and courts have generally not given much weight to the idea of a right to privacy. The notion that the Constitution provides a right to privacy wasn't articulated by the Supreme Court until 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut (a case about birth control that paved the way for Roe v. Wade). See http://faculty.ncwc.edu/mstevens/410/410lect16.htm for a good overview. Griswold is still considered bad law by a lot of legal scholars, who think that any right to privacy needs to be added to the Constitution by amendment rather than extrapolated by judicial imagination.
In the future, I hope that the legal interpretation of privacy is changed. Just because we entrust a company or individual detail of our lives does not mean we should give up all privacy interest in those details. I'd like to see a roughly similar right to privacy with regard to our transactions with commercial agents as with legal or medical agents (i.e. attorney-client privilege and doctor-patient confidentiality). In other words, employing an agent to act on our behalf should not automatically remove all privacy of that act.
Of course the problem with rewriting the Constitution every time you have an idea for improving it is that after a while you end up with the sort of Constitution we have in California, which is less a collection of guiding principles than a heap of legislation on steroids: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/const-toc.html
At bottom, what you have is a set of conflicting imperatives. It's perfectly reasonable to charge government with the job of protecting people from military attacks, and as we saw in 2001 the costs of failure to do so can be truly severe. The opportunity costs of investing the government with broad powers to prevent such attacks are much harder to quantify. I have to say that I think the 'war on drugs' has been legally and practically far more destructive of liberty than the Patriot act or the NSA (but please don't interpret this as an endorsement of the latter). I don't worry about top-down totalitarian government nearly as much as I do about the inexorable economics of privately run prisons and city and county pension gaps. People don't care as much about the liberty of crack- and meth-heads (since drug addicts stereotypically have little consideration for others), so we craft these overbroad laws intended to protect the legitimate interests of good people by scapegoating ne'er-do-wells.
I found this article to be useful in differentiating the various terms:
On its face, the document suggests that the U.S. government regularly collects and stores all domestic telephone records. I use the caveat because there are several ways to interpret it, assuming it is real. (It looks real.)
A few definitions: to "collect" means to gather and store; to "analyze" means that a computer or human actually does something with the records; to "intercept" means that a computer or human actually listens to or records calls.
... The NSA, under the FISA Amendments Act, is able to analyze metadata, like incoming and outgoing call records, so long as the Attorney General certifies that a particular set of information is useful for reasons of national security. Then, the NSA asks the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to order that a company comply. As that bill was being ironed out, this step was requested by private companies because they wanted protection from lawsuits in case innocents — or millions of innocents — found that the NSA had gathered their call information.
My own understanding is that the NSA routinely collects millions of domestic-to-domestic phone records. It does not do anything with them unless there is a need to search through them for lawful purposes. That is, an analyst at the NSA cannot legally simply perform random searches through the stored data. He or she needs to have a reason, usually some intelligence tip. That would allow him or her to segregate the part of the data that's necessary to analyze, and proceed from there.
In a way, it makes sense for the NSA to collect all telephone records because it can't know in advance what sections or slices it might need in the future. It does not follow that simply because the NSA collects data that it is legal for the NSA to use the data for foreign intelligence or counter-terrorism analysis.
http://theweek.com/article/index/245228/the-fbi-collects-all...
This is written specifically about the telephone call metadata, but being able to differentiate exactly what is collected about Internet traffic would also aid this discussion. Unfortunately this would only be possible if the government was more transparent about what is being collected.