(network)technologies used by NSA for data collection

Sun Mar 22 02:29:13 UTC 2015

Sorry. I got trigger happy. The STAs can read data Rey efficiently from multiple wavelengths or grey light simultaneously. 

Jason Bothe, Manager of Networking
Rice University

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jason at rice.edu                                                            

> On Mar 21, 2015, at 21:05, Martin T <m4rtntns at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I watched "Citizenfour"(imdb.com/title/tt4044364/) documentary and at
> 41:12 Edward Snowden gives a brief overview of some of the leaked
> documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill. At 42:57
> Snowden mentions devices which are able to collect data at rate of
> 1Tbps. This was in 2011. Screen-shots from the movie can be seen here:
> https://nsa.gov1.info/dni/2014/tumult.jpg Third slide looks like some
> sort of vendor product roadmap :)
> Just out of curiosity, what kind of equipment those might be? Is it
> realistic that NSA/DoD are able to produce their own hardware? Let
> alone custom silicon like Cisco or Juniper are. Or do they use off the
> self hardware.. In addition, it's relatively easy to install a passive
> fiber optical tap for a submarine cable, but how do you get
> information out of it? I mean all the different wavelengths(CWDM/DWDM)
> within the same cable, line rates(up to 100GigE), circuit switched and
> packet switched technologies which those devices should support.. In
> addition, how(bandwidth and network wise) to transport this data to
> data analysis and storage equipment if it collected far away from
> USA..
> Some of those questions or thoughts might be naive and stupid, but
> that's what crossed my mind when I watched the documentary. Maybe
> somebody, who has done more research in this field, could clarify.
> 
> 
> 
> thanks,
> Martin
> 