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The Ultimate Net Monitoring Tool?
Wired News is reporting that the equipment found in the "secret" NSA room at AT&T wasn't some elaborate device designed by Big Brother. Rather, it is a commercially available network-analysis product that any company could acquire. From the article: "'Anything that comes through (an IP network), we can record,' says Steve Bannerman, marketing vice president of Narus, a Mountain View, California, company. 'We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on, we can reconstruct their VOIP calls.'"
It's not too surprising that the government would use off-the shelf solutions for electronic devices. After all, there aren't many circuit boards made in the United States still, are there? How much does Texas Instruments produce domestically for instance?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
It's legal for you to send packets over network connections owned and operated by third parties. If you have an expectation of privacy for data being handled by parties you have no relationship with, you're being unreasonable. I don't have any contract with AT&T, so what they do with my information is outside my control. I wouldn't do business with my ISP if they didn't have network connections that would get traffic to/from the rest of the world for me, so I'm giving up control once I send data out.
Are you willing to pay 100 times what you pay now to ensure that your traffic doesn't cross the systems of someone who won't respect your privacy? Instead of $50/mo for broadband, would you pay $5000/mo? Keeping data off the backbone networks would be very expensive. Asking them to report what they collect just increases the burden, which translates directly into cost.
Private companies running this on their own networks are in an even more reasonable position. Are you afraid of them finding out that you're doing something using work computers and work networks on work time? If my employer records the fact that I posted this on company time, that's their choice. It's their system. If I don't want them recording it, I could wait and do it from home later.
And if they are recording it, I want to give a big thanks to the corporate security and networking guys - you're doing a great job! =)