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How the U.S. Became Switchboard to the World
slugo sent in this Wired story which opens, "A lucky coincidence of economics is responsible for routing much of the world's internet and telephone traffic through switching points in the United States, where, under legislation introduced this week, the U.S. National Security Agency will be free to continue tapping it. ...International phone and internet traffic flows through the United States largely because of pricing models established more than 100 years ago... The United States, where the internet was invented, was also home to the first internet backbone. Combine that architectural advantage with the pricing disparity inherited from the phone networks, and the United States quickly became the center of cyberspace as the internet gained international penetration in the 1990s."
The easiest way is just stop accepting packets from the internet.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
RTFA: it explains that London is quickly becoming a major hub for European communications. The map is especially revealing in that respect.
The NZ and AUS participartion in UKUSA is quite interesting, since these countries can be used to tap satellite communications. Quite a lot of fiber goes in and out of Australia as well.
Communication interception requires more than access to fiber, and these two countries also provide some much needed real-estate.
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
In fact I just yesterday landed back in the UK after four weeks there.
My country (UK) is just as bad if not worse with surveilance, but one country having most of the traffic going through it isn't a good thing, IMHO, even if we're just talking about network resilience.
I hate to say it but I have to - if the current abuses (guantanamo bay etc) are not any worse than before then the US really needs to pipe down with this "freedom" rhetoric.
Probably I agree with you in principle - people now are no worse in intent than ever before, it's just easier to achieve what the security state wants to acheive now, and it's also easier to report on all the bad stuff going on.
I am from the UK and I used to use JANET, but I think the Americans do have far more claim to having invented the internet than anyone else. JANET was X25 based. ARPANET used TCP/IP. The WWW (HTTP and HTML) came out of CERN, but that is not the internet.
Of course you need to be careful not to muddle up the Internet and the World Wide Web as journalists so often do. The web was invented in Switzerland.
That map is highly misleading, at least for Internet traffic - it shows usage, not topology.
It used to be, in the beginning, that most Internet traffic went through the US, as links were leased lines mostly to / from the US. Now, it mostly follows the fiber. (Most of the global undersea fiber, BTW, is owned by two Indian companies, Reliance and VSNL.) Most Japan / India traffic, for example, or Japan / Austrialia traffic, will never touch the US. Ditto Middle East / Japan or Middle East / India, or Europe / India or Europe / Middle East. Only for Europe / East Asia or Australia / Europe is there a good chance (not a certainty) that you will be routed through the US.
Of course, all of this is based on where the fiber goes, and your milage may definitely vary - ISPs don't always do the most sensible thing. As an example, 3 days after 9/11 a major ISP lost their connection between France and Germany, as it turned out that they were routing that traffic through a New York telco hotel, which went down when the generators ran out of diesel fuel. I was told that there was no institutional memory in the ISP that this was being done, and it made no sense from a fiber topology standpoint, but there it was.
Actually, the Dutch government is one of the easier wiretappers in Europe. Thanks to a few years of economic depression and costs crackdown in the police department, police were forced to use more wiretapping. And now it's very commonplace.
Incidentally, if you're living in NL then don't forget to come to Utrecht this Monday.
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For someone with a such a strong opinion you are gravely misinformed.
I know you are a troll but I just can't resist a reply, especially since there is a remote chance that some other misinformed people might actually think that you know what you are talking about.
The "leftie" coalition of Socialdemokraterna, Miljöpartiet and Vänsterpartiet are the ones responsible for pushing the whole surveillance agenda in the EU and later legislating about it in Sweden.
Thomas Bodström, our former socialdemocrat minister of "Justice", is the architect behind it all.
"Vote right (vote left)" ? I think not!
What about the American Revolution? That was kinda violent.
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." - H.L. Mencken