So what if it was a one character typo? "m" substituted for "b"... happens all the time in these kinds of presentations...
M -----Original Message----- From: liberationtech-boun...@lists.stanford.edu [mailto:liberationtech-boun...@lists.stanford.edu] On Behalf Of Eugen Leitl Sent: Friday, June 07, 2013 12:42 PM To: Liberation Technologies; cypherpu...@al-qaeda.net; i...@postbiota.org; zs-...@googlegroups.com Subject: Re: [liberationtech] PRISM: NSA/FBI Internet data mining project ----- Forwarded message from Matthew Petach <mpet...@netflight.com> ----- Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2013 09:32:53 -0700 From: Matthew Petach <mpet...@netflight.com> Cc: NANOG <na...@nanog.org> Subject: Re: PRISM: NSA/FBI Internet data mining project On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 5:04 PM, Matthew Petach <mpet...@netflight.com>wrote: > > > On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 4:35 PM, Jay Ashworth <j...@baylink.com> wrote: > >> Has fingers directly in servers of top Internet content companies, >> dates to 2007. Happily, none of the companies listed are transport >> networks: >> >> >> http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-d >> ata-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/0 >> 6/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html >> >> Cheers, >> -- jra >> -- >> Jay R. Ashworth Baylink >> j...@baylink.com >> Designer The Things I Think RFC >> 2100 >> Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land >> Rover DII >> St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 >> 647 1274 >> >> > > I've always just assumed that if it's in electronic form, someone else > is either reading it now, has already read it, or will read it as soon > as I walk away from the screen. > > Much less stress in life that way. ^_^ > > Matt > > When I posted this yesterday, I was speaking somewhat tongue-in-cheek, because we hadn't yet made a formal statement to the press. Now that we've made our official reply, I can echo it, and note that whatever fluffed up powerpoint was passed around to the washington post, it does not reflect reality. There are no optical taps in our datacenters funneling information out, there are no sooper-seekret backdoors in the software that funnel information to the government. As our formal reply stated: "Yahoo does not provide the government with direct access to its servers, systems, or network." I believe the other major players supposedly listed in the document have released similar statements, all indicating a similar lack of super-cheap government listening capabilities. Speaking just for myself, and if you quote me on this as speaking on anyone else's behalf, you're a complete fool, if the government was able to build infrastructure that could listen to all the traffic from a major provider for a fraction of what it costs them to handle that traffic in the first place, I'd be truly amazed--and I'd probably wonder why the company didn't outsource their infrastruture to the government, if they can build and run it so much more cheaply than the commercial providers. ;P 7 companies were listed; if we assume the burden was split roughly evenly between them, that's 20M/7, about $2.85M per company per year to tap in, or about $238,000/month per company listed, to supposedly snoop on hundreds of gigs per second of data. Two ways to handle it: tap in, and funnel copies of all traffic back to distant monitoring posts, or have local servers digesting and filtering, just extracting the few nuggets they want, and sending just those back. Let's take the first case; doing optical taps, or other form of direct traffic mirroring, carrying it untouched offsite to process; that's going to mean the ability to siphon off hundreds of Gbps per datacenter and carry it offsite for $238k/month; let's figure a major player has data split across at least 3 datacenters, so about $75K/month per datacenter to carry say 300Gbps of traffic. It's pretty clearly going to have to be DWDM on dark fiber at that traffic volume; most recent quotes I've seen for dark fiber put it at $325/mile for already-laid-in-ground (new builds are considerably more, of course). If we figure the three datacenters are split around just the US, on average you're going to need to run about 1500 miles to reach their central listening post; that's $49K/month just to carry the bitstream, which leaves you just about $25K/month to run the servers to digest that data; at 5c/kwhr, a typical server pulling 300 watts is gonna cost you $11/month to run; let's assume each server can process 2Gbps of traffic, constantly; 150 servers for the stream of 300Gbps means we're down to $22K for the rest of our support costs; figure two sysadmins getting paid $10k/month to run the servers (120k annual salary), and you've got just $2k for G&A overhead. That's a heck of an efficient operation they'd have to be running to listen in on all the traffic for the supposed budget number claimed. I'm late for work; I'll follow up with a runthrough of the other model, doing on-site digestion and processing later, but I think you can see the point--it's not realistic to think they can handle the volumes of data being claimed at the price numbers listed. If they could, the major providers would already be doing it for much cheaper than they are today. I mean, the Utah datacenter they're building is costing them $2B to build; does anyone really think if they're overpaying that much for datacenter space, they could really snoop on provider traffic for only $238K/month? More later--and remember, this is purely my own rampant speculation, I'm not speaking for anyone, on behalf of anyone, or even remotely authorized or acknowledged by any entity on this rambling, so please don't go quoting this anywhere else, it'll make you look foolish, and probably get me in trouble anyhow. :( Matt ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://ativel.com http://postbiota.org AC894EC5: 38A5 5F46 A4FF 59B8 336B 47EE F46E 3489 AC89 4EC5 -- Too many emails? Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at compa...@stanford.edu or changing your settings at https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech -- Too many emails? 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