4 ms·

Is a citation really needed about the NSA collecting basically all the data on the Internet? This is "common knowledge" in information security circles. Go look

Is a citation really needed about the NSA collecting basically all the data on the Internet? This is "common knowledge" in information security circles. Go look up the battles the EFF has fought with the NSA about their data collection practices. The NSA is continually building giant data warehouses everywhere... they probably have more data centers than any other organization in existence. They collect all the data.

slips 7y ago
It's pretty common for people to throw out "citation needed" when they don't want to believe or admit something, but can't plausibly deny it. Sort of the same way people use the term "fallacy" these days.
- Fnoord 7y ago
  IMO "Citation needed" is a quick way to say "do you have a source for me?", and "fallacy" (hardly used without also mentioning the specific fallacy) is a quicker way to say "I recognized logic flaw X in your argument". You are free to see harm in these statements but telling me they are always meant as harmful as you mentioned is your own negative reflection. Not mine or ours, we are free to have our own interpretation as well.
  - bitexploder 7y ago
    I think citation needed carries a connotation of “I don’t believe this is true.” It is just a lazy way to converse if you are engaged in a genial conversation in good faith. “This is new to me, can you share some references?” I appreciate we can be technical and to the point, but given the context, I felt my response was appropriate.
    - Fnoord 7y ago
      I do understand you interpret it as "I don't believe this is true" but my explanation "do you have a source for me?" is also a likely explanation. If I then apply the HN rules where the reader must assume good faith and interpret posts in the most positive way, I'm leaning towards assuming "do you have a source for me?"
joshuamorton 7y ago
> Is a citation really needed about the NSA collecting basically all the data on the Internet? Honestly, yes. According to some random infographic I came across, americans use ~2 million GB (2PB) of data per minute. We'll round down and call that one EB per day. So round down again and call it 300 EB per year (a high estimate would be 1K EB, or 1 YB). That's more than the entire global output of disk storage annually, and the NSA aren't the only ones who want hard drives. Keep in mind that much (most?) of that data is encrypted in transit, so targeting exactly which data they want is not always possible.
- brantonb 7y ago
  If a billion people watch the same YouTube video, the NSA isn’t going to store a billion copies of it.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    ...But they don't know it's the same youtube video. It's just an encrypted bytes from a connection to youtube.com. Now you might be able to infer from metadata what the video is sometimes, but given that youtube does things like dynamically change the resolution it sends over the wire based on network congestion during a single watch session, it's not clear that size and length metadata would be enough to dedupe.
    - bitexploder 7y ago
      It is endearing to me that people still think the NSA can't break most of the TLS traffic on the the Internet. I have my doubts about the security provided by traffic that transits US soil and is protected by US CAs. High skepticism would be a better way to put it. Citation needed, and I don't have one, but it is safest to assume they have this capability, and before anyone gets up in arms about this statement, I do understand how certificate authorities and TLS works and I don't think they have to break it cryptographically. Keep in mind there are side channel attacks that let you guess passwords typed via SSH. I wouldn't be even a little surprised if the side channel leakage of most Internet traffic zooming around via TLS is good enough that the NSA can sort it pretty easily. This is all theorizing on my part, though. What we do know is they can probably collect a huge amount of useful traffic and store it for a relatively short, but useful amount of time (weeks, probably). Kind of like a ring buffer. Systems are always sifting and flagging and saving some portion of what they are collecting, including raw traffic. Also consider that there are lots of ways of unmasking the basic metadata of the streams through any number of leaky things happening in the web browser. This traffic is collected in an un-targeted fashion. They just promise (pinky swear) they don't look at it without a search warrant. Then a search program executes and they retrieve it from the data stores. Think about that legal theory, because that is exactly what Michael Hayden testified to. I don't know if it is just an age gap or something else, but I think people on HN are not aware of the extreme data collection the NSA performs and the ongoing threat this is, and continues to be, to privacy. Anyhow, I think the generation after millennials should be called the surveillance generation, because it's all tracked. I just can't understand the skepticism at what the NSA is doing because of some lazy back of the envelope math. Anyway, this isn't really targeted at you as a reply, but this whole thread... there was a time when this sort of skepticism was basically the norm in technical circles with little doubt. Now I see it eroding in general tech circles.
lern_too_spel 7y ago
> Is a citation really needed about the NSA collecting basically all the data on the Internet? Yes because this claim is preposterous. You don't even need a napkin to show this is impossible. > This is "common knowledge" in information security circles. The "common knowledge" in Internet industry circles is that Snowden misinterpreted several documents and made wild claims about what they said. > Go look up the battles the EFF has fought with the NSA about their data collection practices. Snowden's documents showed that the EFF arguments against about what was happening at AT&T were unfounded. The documents showed that instead of copying everything, they filtered to traffic to or from certain foreign targets outside the US.
- bitexploder 7y ago
  I think that is honestly not what those documents show at all. How they actually do it is ripe for abuse and egregiously broad and beyond the scope of simple foreign monitoring.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    > I think that is honestly not what those documents show at all. Then either you have the same reading errors as Snowden, or you haven't looked at the actual documents instead of Greenwald's incompetent reporting of them.
rossjudson 7y ago
But where do they put it?
- bitexploder 7y ago
  Utah. There is a very high chance this conversation is now sitting on a disk in Utah for a bit. Collectively the NSA has built or leases more data center space than almost any other entity on the planet. Maybe not even the big four (goog amzn fb) rival them. What are they doing with all that space and black budget?

slips 7y ago

It's pretty common for people to throw out "citation needed" when they don't want to believe or admit something, but can't plausibly deny it. Sort of the same way people use the term "fallacy" these days.

Fnoord 7y ago
IMO "Citation needed" is a quick way to say "do you have a source for me?", and "fallacy" (hardly used without also mentioning the specific fallacy) is a quicker way to say "I recognized logic flaw X in your argument". You are free to see harm in these statements but telling me they are always meant as harmful as you mentioned is your own negative reflection. Not mine or ours, we are free to have our own interpretation as well.
- bitexploder 7y ago
  I think citation needed carries a connotation of “I don’t believe this is true.” It is just a lazy way to converse if you are engaged in a genial conversation in good faith. “This is new to me, can you share some references?” I appreciate we can be technical and to the point, but given the context, I felt my response was appropriate.
  - Fnoord 7y ago
    I do understand you interpret it as "I don't believe this is true" but my explanation "do you have a source for me?" is also a likely explanation. If I then apply the HN rules where the reader must assume good faith and interpret posts in the most positive way, I'm leaning towards assuming "do you have a source for me?"

joshuamorton 7y ago

> Is a citation really needed about the NSA collecting basically all the data on the Internet? Honestly, yes. According to some random infographic I came across, americans use ~2 million GB (2PB) of data per minute. We'll round down and call that one EB per day. So round down again and call it 300 EB per year (a high estimate would be 1K EB, or 1 YB). That's more than the entire global output of disk storage annually, and the NSA aren't the only ones who want hard drives. Keep in mind that much (most?) of that data is encrypted in transit, so targeting exactly which data they want is not always possible.

brantonb 7y ago
If a billion people watch the same YouTube video, the NSA isn’t going to store a billion copies of it.
- joshuamorton 7y ago
  ...But they don't know it's the same youtube video. It's just an encrypted bytes from a connection to youtube.com. Now you might be able to infer from metadata what the video is sometimes, but given that youtube does things like dynamically change the resolution it sends over the wire based on network congestion during a single watch session, it's not clear that size and length metadata would be enough to dedupe.
  - bitexploder 7y ago
    It is endearing to me that people still think the NSA can't break most of the TLS traffic on the the Internet. I have my doubts about the security provided by traffic that transits US soil and is protected by US CAs. High skepticism would be a better way to put it. Citation needed, and I don't have one, but it is safest to assume they have this capability, and before anyone gets up in arms about this statement, I do understand how certificate authorities and TLS works and I don't think they have to break it cryptographically. Keep in mind there are side channel attacks that let you guess passwords typed via SSH. I wouldn't be even a little surprised if the side channel leakage of most Internet traffic zooming around via TLS is good enough that the NSA can sort it pretty easily. This is all theorizing on my part, though. What we do know is they can probably collect a huge amount of useful traffic and store it for a relatively short, but useful amount of time (weeks, probably). Kind of like a ring buffer. Systems are always sifting and flagging and saving some portion of what they are collecting, including raw traffic. Also consider that there are lots of ways of unmasking the basic metadata of the streams through any number of leaky things happening in the web browser. This traffic is collected in an un-targeted fashion. They just promise (pinky swear) they don't look at it without a search warrant. Then a search program executes and they retrieve it from the data stores. Think about that legal theory, because that is exactly what Michael Hayden testified to. I don't know if it is just an age gap or something else, but I think people on HN are not aware of the extreme data collection the NSA performs and the ongoing threat this is, and continues to be, to privacy. Anyhow, I think the generation after millennials should be called the surveillance generation, because it's all tracked. I just can't understand the skepticism at what the NSA is doing because of some lazy back of the envelope math. Anyway, this isn't really targeted at you as a reply, but this whole thread... there was a time when this sort of skepticism was basically the norm in technical circles with little doubt. Now I see it eroding in general tech circles.

lern_too_spel 7y ago

> Is a citation really needed about the NSA collecting basically all the data on the Internet? Yes because this claim is preposterous. You don't even need a napkin to show this is impossible. > This is "common knowledge" in information security circles. The "common knowledge" in Internet industry circles is that Snowden misinterpreted several documents and made wild claims about what they said. > Go look up the battles the EFF has fought with the NSA about their data collection practices. Snowden's documents showed that the EFF arguments against about what was happening at AT&T were unfounded. The documents showed that instead of copying everything, they filtered to traffic to or from certain foreign targets outside the US.

bitexploder 7y ago
I think that is honestly not what those documents show at all. How they actually do it is ripe for abuse and egregiously broad and beyond the scope of simple foreign monitoring.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  > I think that is honestly not what those documents show at all. Then either you have the same reading errors as Snowden, or you haven't looked at the actual documents instead of Greenwald's incompetent reporting of them.

rossjudson 7y ago

But where do they put it?

bitexploder 7y ago
Utah. There is a very high chance this conversation is now sitting on a disk in Utah for a bit. Collectively the NSA has built or leases more data center space than almost any other entity on the planet. Maybe not even the big four (goog amzn fb) rival them. What are they doing with all that space and black budget?