Internet Surveillance and Boomerang Routing: A Call for Canadian Network Sovereignty

Mon Sep 9 20:12:53 UTC 2013

On 9/7/2013 5:33 PM, Harald Koch wrote:
> On 7 September 2013 17:08, Paul Ferguson <fergdawgster at mykolab.com> wrote:
>> "Preliminary analysis of more than 25,000 traceroutes reveals a
>> phenomenon we call ‘boomerang routing’ whereby Canadian-to-Canadian
>> internet transmissions are routinely routed through the United States.
>
> I sincerely hope that nobody in Canada is surprised by this, since it was
> already an issue in 1994 (when I was at CA*net).

Much farther back than that.

In 1985 I was working in Toronto and did a proposal for a national X.25 
network.  The pragmatics for reliability were simple at a national 
scale:  Essentially all Canadian telecom links went through a few common 
sites across the country; if you wanted redundancy you had to have a 
second, independent path through the US.

Given that most Canadian population occupies a relatively thin band 
(close to the US border), this topological fragility was/is largely 
inherent.

d/

-- 
Dave Crocker
Brandenburg InternetWorking
bbiw.net