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Question to the more experienced hackers here: Would such a massive undertaking be possible without the knowledge of the regular developers working at these co

Question to the more experienced hackers here: Would such a massive undertaking be possible without the knowledge of the regular developers working at these companies? Some big names on that list, like Facebook (and I think Dropbox was 'coming soon'). If developers at these companies knew about these measures, I'm really skeptical in believing that it took an intelligence officer to expose this story. Chances would be much higher of devs at these companies (chances being good that some of them are the reddit/HN libertarian types) would have exposed this long ago. Is such an operation feasible without the knowledge of hundreds of Google/facebook/other engineers?

andrewmccall 13y ago
I had the same question and it leads me to believe the companies saying they had no idea. Someone at Google/MS/Facebook would almost surely notice those extra servers over there, all that extra network traffic going somewhere, or those cables that seem to go into a locked closet. I think it's far more likely this is built off the back of the data they're already known to be sucking down via major exchanges. A national security letter for the TLS certs and you can take what you want, when you want off straight from the stream of packets.