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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."
James Bamford has written (in Body of Secrets ) about the NSA can depend on the help of other countries, namely the UK, New Zealand, and Australia, to intercept communications for the U.S. What major Internet pipes run through those three countries (well, probably not much through NZ)?
As a Swedish citizen, I feel so lucky that all my communications will be monitored by a government I can not influence through voting!
c++;
I, for one, do not welcome the casnning of my email by the USA, a country of which I am not a part and have no influence over. A country which is proving itself ever les freedom loving and ever more dubious over human rights and the rule of law (as it applies to governments, police, courts and the military).
Meh, guess I'll keep using ssh wherever possible.
The easiest way is just stop accepting packets from the internet.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
It somehow amuses me to think that the United States is spending resources in trying to figure out what I'm saying when I make an international call that has nothing to do with the US. The tapping software itself, AI to detect catch phrases, language experts to worry about translation, AND worrying about the legal issues involved in all of this. All this because my mother wants to know if I'm having dinner properly or not. By all means, tap away.
I don't want to read
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 wonder how much data can be encrypted using Steganography in that infamous Goatse image
CIA can look at a gapping hole all day then for all i care!
I'd be very doubtful of the information shown by that graph. It seems to suggest that there's more telephone traffic between London and Western Australia, and between the USA and eastern Australia than there is between the two bits of Australia. Even if you accept that unlikely fact, why is that people in Western Australia phone London and people in eastern Australia don't?
I suspect that the graph has been prepared from data which simply shows where calls passing through the USA and London have originated. Calls which don't pass through a few nominated hubs simply haven't been included, which is obviously going to lead to the distorted results shown.
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.
Laying fiber across a countryside, much less an ocean requires corporate dollars. Even Gates, Ellison, etc. would notice a substantial hit to their pocket book if they funded a trans-oceanic cable. And, that cable has to be maintained. That cost money.
The point is, your internet communications are always going to in control of someone with a lot more money and susceptible and even beholden to political influence. Get used to it.
Encrypt your data if necessary (99.5% of it is no where near that important) and you're done.
What kills me is that a quarter to a half of the people who are up in arms about this publish their daily lives and personal details on blogs which Google, MSN and Yahoo immediately suck up. Yet it if the NSA wants to know whats going on... they go ape-sh*t. Here's a clue people... I don't talk about my private life on the intertubes... never have... never will.
Just check for the evil bit?
Having said that, I live in the Netherlands. I don't really see much reason to trust my own government any more than the US gov with my voice/data. If you're going to make super-secret communications, just don't send them unencrypted over a vast and dangerous network.
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.
As european most of my european, russian and asian traffic rarely goes over US lines, maybe through US companies but still routers placed in Europe.
But Mr. NSA, if you really wanna listen in, could you please remove the spam for me?
This will continue as long as large numbers of religious leaders and religious voters continue to run the country. You have to understand that about half this country believes that we are in a religious war to defeat an unholy enemy and that on both sides of this religiously motivated war will do whatever it takes to win. This applies just as much to the Islamic fanatics of the Wahabi in Saudi Arabia, as it does to the Christian fanatics that are prevalent in the US Military such as Peter Pace, and Congress, like Orrin Hatch.
Do understand something about Christianity though. Keep in mind, I am a Secular Aignostic. I don't believe in Christian doctrines.
In the Bible, God didn't come down and be selected by two thirds majority. In the Bible, The ten commandments aren't Ten generally considered good ideas, they are commandments. To this end, A cataclysmic impass has occurred.
Whether God exists is sorta irrellevent to the discussion sadly.
All these doctrines call for the ahnialation of all the others. Now how people implement the philosophies may vary, and some interpretations cherry pick and are benign enough to be tolerant. But the doctrines are not Tolerant. Tolerance would be seen as weakness in the tone these doctrines and allow them to be undermined. So the doctrines in their purest form call for the suppression of all freedoms and the extermination of competing ideas. Christian people can be very tolerant. but the actual religion itself is incapable of being tolerant. The same is true of Islam. The doctrines are written in a depressingly genocidal way.
Well, why is this important to whats going on now? Well. we now have U.S. Style Jeffersonian democracy vs. Christianity. For doctrines like Christianity in our case and Islam in theirs, Jeffersonian Demoracy and Christianity are incompatible. In the U.S. enough Americans chose Jesus over the Constitution. There were enough Americans who felt that following the dictates of their God was so important that they put people in power who believed as they did that religion was simply more important, and were willing to cast the constitution aside. The prevailing sentiment was there was "Too much Freedom, not enough God" Christian doctrine is such that things like Freedom of speech, privacy, etc cannot be tolerated because they undermine the religion. As long as the US loves God/Jesus more than Freedom, no one will have freedom, because in both the Bible and the Quran, no one has any freedom.
We get the privilige of living in a freer society only when times are peaceful, and the religious doctrines can be safely "ignored for convienence". Because part of being free means you are free Not to follow the religion's wishes. As such, Religions like Christianity and Islam, and liberal free society are fundamentally incompatible. We elected leaders who ascribe to this, so our freedoms, such as our private telephone conversations are going to be monitored to keep an eye on the population of 'good Christians'. It doesn't end there. Thats just the tip of the iceburg
Pricing of products, plans for entering markets in the US etc? You're not concerned that information might make it into the hands of your competitors?
Deleted
Fine. You can have TCP/IP. Can we have the WWW back?
Its this stupid "We invented it" mentality that is horribly twisted thruths, that makes US people behave like overlords all the time.
Get a grip, complex technologgy isn't invented, hasnt been invented in this case, and sure as hell doesn't deserve the qualification "invented in the US".
The United States, where the internet was invented by Al Gore.
There. Fixed it.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
How much do you earn each year?
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.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
I know it's fun to hop on the "let's hate the USA" parade, but come on.
/really/ think that every other country in the world doesn't monitor the communications systems that route through /their/ country?
Does anyone
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Those original pricing models were set by the government, to compensate for allowing AT&T to operate a monopoly in an essential industry. They were updated to be even more encouraging to attract foreign routing when the AT&T monopoly was broken up. Which breakup was also responsible for the fast, extensive and open growth of the Internet.
If AT&T had run its monopoly without government intervention to protect people and markets, the domestic infrastructure wouldn't have been so attractive.
Which makes the current recoup by AT&T of nearly all its monopoly such an obvious threat. And its secret collusion with its only competitor, Verizon, to wiretap us such an obviously perverted government role in assembling a cartel. And making selective prosecution of Qwest, because Qwest refused to collude with the cartel, one of the worst crimes (not involving torture or killing, at least as far as we know) that Bush has committed against us.
We got those privileges because we kept our telecom monopolies under control, and our government in the service of protecting the people. Now that Bush has reversed that system, egging on monopolies to use them against the people, our entire system is a nightmare.
Hear that, AT&T?
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make install -not war