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If I were hiding from a state actor I'd use a high-bandwidth communications medium like video. In another life I worked for a large live streaming service, the

If I were hiding from a state actor I'd use a high-bandwidth communications medium like video. In another life I worked for a large live streaming service, the infrastructure required to process terabits of video is mind-boggling in size, extremely technically challenging, and usually involves custom built ASICs and hardware that's expensive and in short supply. Even with the NSA's budget and infrastructure, I don't think it's technologically feasible for them to decrypt and then semantically process or store that much content. Video is also the vast majority of traffic on the Internet so it would be trivial to hide in plain sight with some creativity (Using stenography to hide content in the video) With 4k you can pack a ridiculous amount of information into even a single frame, and that's one frame among hundreds of thousands, among billions of videos.

autoexec 4y ago
> Even with the NSA's budget and infrastructure, I don't think it's technologically feasible for them to decrypt and then semantically process or store that much content. I have little doubt that they can store terabits of video content. They let us know about their utah data center (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center) which was estimated to have as much as 12 exabytes in 2013 and who knows what data centers they have they aren't mentioning. Back in 2003 they had no problems capturing every bit of data that moved over AT&Ts network. Storage is dirt cheap and they can just hang onto everything until they see a reason to dig into it. No need to process everything right away. You'd think your video would be blending in with all the other video on the internet, but it really wouldn't. Streaming video put out by netflix is going to look very different than streaming video served via youtube vs streaming video over P2P etc.
- derangedHorse 4y ago
  OP said he doesn't "think it's technologically feasible for them to decrypt and then semantically process or store that much content" meaning it's more about just storing the raw data. Assuming they could store it perfectly fine (which is a big 'if' considering Cisco estimated 7.7 Exabytes of data would be generated per day by 2021), they'd still have to decrypt all the videos, semantically analyze each video (subtitles, object detection, face recognition, etc), find a way to index that information to make it queryable, and run analytics on that data regularly. Ideally they wouldn't have to search everything when needed and could keep a running file on everyone (because lazily parsing data could be expensive and probably a waste on their existing current resources). That's not to say they can't do it, given that they probably have a huge budget, but it's also not a sure thing they can do it effectively for those who are trying to stay hidden.
smolder 4y ago
> it would be trivial to hide in plain sight with some creativity (Using stenography to hide content in the video) Steganography is the word in this case. Stenography is different, it means short-hand writing.

autoexec 4y ago

> Even with the NSA's budget and infrastructure, I don't think it's technologically feasible for them to decrypt and then semantically process or store that much content. I have little doubt that they can store terabits of video content. They let us know about their utah data center (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center) which was estimated to have as much as 12 exabytes in 2013 and who knows what data centers they have they aren't mentioning. Back in 2003 they had no problems capturing every bit of data that moved over AT&Ts network. Storage is dirt cheap and they can just hang onto everything until they see a reason to dig into it. No need to process everything right away. You'd think your video would be blending in with all the other video on the internet, but it really wouldn't. Streaming video put out by netflix is going to look very different than streaming video served via youtube vs streaming video over P2P etc.

derangedHorse 4y ago
OP said he doesn't "think it's technologically feasible for them to decrypt and then semantically process or store that much content" meaning it's more about just storing the raw data. Assuming they could store it perfectly fine (which is a big 'if' considering Cisco estimated 7.7 Exabytes of data would be generated per day by 2021), they'd still have to decrypt all the videos, semantically analyze each video (subtitles, object detection, face recognition, etc), find a way to index that information to make it queryable, and run analytics on that data regularly. Ideally they wouldn't have to search everything when needed and could keep a running file on everyone (because lazily parsing data could be expensive and probably a waste on their existing current resources). That's not to say they can't do it, given that they probably have a huge budget, but it's also not a sure thing they can do it effectively for those who are trying to stay hidden.

smolder 4y ago

> it would be trivial to hide in plain sight with some creativity (Using stenography to hide content in the video) Steganography is the word in this case. Stenography is different, it means short-hand writing.