FBI is at it again

Mon Oct 29 20:56:00 UTC 2001

> Unfortunately, just because we know how difficult it is to provide a
> solution to this problem, does not mean that everyone subscribes to it.
One
> should not discount the argument made based purely on the source,
> especially since recently a few very "interesting" articles showed up in a
> number of publications, including current issue of Forbes. The author,
whose
> name escapes me at this time, is under the ill-belief that since the
> internet traffic does flow though hubs, it would be possible to intercept
it
> and store it on the computers located in those hubs. It is more likely
that
> a white paper describing the issues arising from attempts to intercept and
> store that much data would do better than an argument about unreliability
> of the source.
>
>
> Alex

It's obvious that many people spreading this information (no matter how
credible the source, have little knowledge of how much data flows through
such hubs).  If I remember correctly, AOL-TW for example does over 100
Terabits of traffic every day. No storage system in the world (that I know
of) can write at 10 GB/sec (not forgetting that at OC-192 speeds we are
writing 36 Terabytes of Data per hour).  Not even the most prestigious
government agencies have the ability to sort through petabytes of data per
day.