(network)technologies used by NSA for data collection

Martin T m4rtntns at gmail.com
Sun Mar 22 15:42:06 UTC 2015


I see, thanks! However, this all requires at least some level of
Internet operator cooperation? For example if ISP in Northern Europe
owns a sub-marine cable between Finland and Sweden and they decide to
upgrade their legacy Nortel equipment with STM-64 line-card in both
ends of the cable to a Juniper T1600 core routers with 100GigE
line-cards, then it's not possible that intelligence agency equipment
supports this, is it?
In addition, how is the collected data transported for storing in
(NSA) datacenters and later analysis? I guess the data collection
actually has to be fairly selective simply because the amount of data
is so huge. For example take the large Internet Exchanges where
several Tbps of data are exchanged in peak hours each day.


thanks,
Martin

On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 4:29 AM, Jason Bothe <jason at rice.edu> wrote:
> 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
>
>
> o   +1 713 348 5500
>
> m  +1 713 703 3552
>
> 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
>



More information about the NANOG mailing list