Slashdot Mirror
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."
cough - same as a US citizen then ;-)
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.
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.