4 ms·

When I worked on the main NRO ground processing station for electro-optical collections, we were generating double-digit petabytes daily, and that back in 2008.

When I worked on the main NRO ground processing station for electro-optical collections, we were generating double-digit petabytes daily, and that back in 2008. Don't even know what it's up to now. Not only is there no practical way for anyone other than maybe Google or CERN to download that much data, unlike the no-fly list, actual classified information isn't attached to any networks that can be accessed from outside of a secure facility. This means the only way to egress data is for an inside threat to copy it onto USB drives or possibly optical media, maybe steal hard drives. But there are pretty hard limits to what you can just bulk copy. It can't be much more than a person can hide in a bag.

rsbrans 5y ago
I have a feeling this post may be agedlikemilk worthy in the not so distant future...
BrandoElFollito 5y ago
Glad to see that CERN was mentioned, it is not that often that their IT resources are known (and they are huge)
novok 5y ago
In a really bad situation, couldn't someone make a hard Ethernet link to something connected to the public internet? I wouldn't be surprised if some other non-us government or 5 has already established this kind of stuff. The amount of computers accessing the classified info intranet would be very, very large I would imagine, such that a few modified computers here and there would go virtually undetected. Just look at all the classified crap abandoned at Afghanistan for example.
- cryptonector 5y ago
  Double digits PB/d is way more than 10Gb/s. 10Gb/s is about 100TB/d, so off by two or so orders of magnitude. So, OK you say, let's bond 100Gb/s links or something, but you need machines that can do that, too, and now you can download one copy of one day, per day, of data -- maybe, plus you need all that storage for that one very very vulnerable copy. Can't be done. Big data is hard to deal with. You can't just download the stuff.

rsbrans 5y ago

I have a feeling this post may be agedlikemilk worthy in the not so distant future...

BrandoElFollito 5y ago

Glad to see that CERN was mentioned, it is not that often that their IT resources are known (and they are huge)

novok 5y ago

In a really bad situation, couldn't someone make a hard Ethernet link to something connected to the public internet? I wouldn't be surprised if some other non-us government or 5 has already established this kind of stuff. The amount of computers accessing the classified info intranet would be very, very large I would imagine, such that a few modified computers here and there would go virtually undetected. Just look at all the classified crap abandoned at Afghanistan for example.

cryptonector 5y ago
Double digits PB/d is way more than 10Gb/s. 10Gb/s is about 100TB/d, so off by two or so orders of magnitude. So, OK you say, let's bond 100Gb/s links or something, but you need machines that can do that, too, and now you can download one copy of one day, per day, of data -- maybe, plus you need all that storage for that one very very vulnerable copy. Can't be done. Big data is hard to deal with. You can't just download the stuff.