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When I worked IT for a medium sized university we were asked by the DOJ to install switches that copied all internet traffic directly to an unspecified governme

When I worked IT for a medium sized university we were asked by the DOJ to install switches that copied all internet traffic directly to an unspecified government server. We were told all ISPs (anyone providing internet to more than 100 persons) were told to do this as well. We refused to comply obviously as the request was absurd, but in the small print of the request we were told we were not allowed to speak of the request and were to deny any involvement if asked under some unknown penalty. I wouldn't be surprised if special terms of Google's interaction with any government agencies has a similar clause.

thrownaway2424 13y ago
Please throw out an estimate of how big you think a mirror of all Google's network traffic might be.
- adamdavis 13y ago
  And this is relevant to what?
  - thrownaway2424 13y ago
    It's relevant because some of the things that are being suggested here on HN are clearly infeasible, from an infrastructure standpoint.
    - adamdavis 13y ago
      Word. I get that. I just thought the question sort of steered away from the main point of the parent comment, which was that if Google did have some sort of nefarious partnership that they would be legally obliged to deny it no matter what. My apologies, I'm probably just being a bit nitpicky.
    - Finster 13y ago
      O RLY? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
  - minwcnt5 13y ago
    I think his point is it would be extremely expensive. The leaked presentation claimed the cost of PRISM was only $20M.
    - akiselev 13y ago
      PRISM is clearly not the whole picture. The Utah Data Center alone is much more than $20M a year and PRISM's specified purpose was using US IT infrastructure to intercept foreign communications, which would presumably be filtered from a large data set. The bulk of the data transmission and storage costs are probably under another budget
- rosser 13y ago
  The NSA's Utah data center was designed to host more storage than existed on the entire planet at the time. Sheer volume of data is among the least of their concerns.
  - thrownaway2424 13y ago
    OK, so you can read wikipedia, but does it make any sense? A single 65MW datacenter with only 100ksqft of machine room space can hold all of the data in the world? That's not even as much power as one of Facebook's facilities in Oregon. Remember when IBM announced they'd built the largest filesystem in history? That was only 120PB. A YB is 10 million times bigger than that. Consider also that a YB is 1000x the entire storage industry output from 2012. So under your theory there is a parallel hard disk drive industry consisting of at least 99% of all hard disk production on Earth.
    - jonknee 13y ago
      Facebook's servers spend most of their time finding, sorting and then transmitting bits to the billion people who use Facebook. Storing a bunch of data and storing a bunch of data that needs to be dynamically assembled in real time for a billion users are two very different things. Regardless, no one has theorized that the NSA storing yottabytes of data. The (still probably crazy) rumors are zettabytes.
      - thrownaway2424 13y ago
        "no one has theorized" that except for Wikipedia, Wired magazine, C-Net, and most of the people commenting on this thread. "NSA to store yottabytes in Utah data centre" -- http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/nsa-to-store-yottabytes-in-utah-data-centre-49304118&#x2F http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/nsa-to-store-yottabytes-in-u...;
    - mullingitover 13y ago
      >" A single 65MW datacenter with only 100ksqft of machine room space can hold all of the data in the world? That's not even as much power as one of Facebook's facilities in Oregon." You're off by a factor of 10-15 on the square footage. Per the wiki page, "The planned structure is 1 million or 1.5 million square feet."
- ImprovedSilence 13y ago
  the social "who's talking to who, and what sites did they visit" information... oh, probably this big -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
  - saalweachter 13y ago
    I'd like to point out that their upper capacity limit, "a trillion terabytes", would require approximately 1 trillion hard drives, probably at a cost of $10-$100 trillion. I feel comfortable saying that they have not built out to that scale yet.
- _stephan 13y ago
  They don't need to access to all network traffic, just the interesting bits, like e.g. the internal traffic for the storage/backup systems used for GMail or Google Accounts .
- jonknee 13y ago
  Big. But the NSA has been sucking in ridiculous amounts of data for many many years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software)
bluedino 13y ago
Why would they bother asking you, when they could simply ask your ISP? Why ask each customer?
- jessaustin 13y ago
  Presumably university IT would have been able to provide more precise demographically identifying data than the ISP. It's unlikely the ISP was running the RADIUS server.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - tsunamifury 13y ago
    You're right, I hadn't considered that. Identifying individual students within public areas of the network was only possible through the schools ID system. Otherwise public access would be anyones guess as to who was using the computer.
- tsunamifury 13y ago
  The program and requirements were somewhat surreal. The architecture of the plan seemed to make little to no sense. They considered anyone who provided internet access to 100's of people a provider (mostly universities etc) and requested that they install the pre specified hardware at their own expense (purchase, installation and maintenance). They may have been concerned specifically with universities due to their foreign students and access to certain backbone lines that normal ISP's dont always have (WWW2?). I spoke with the EFF and I was told I wasn't alone, but most people were rejecting the 'request' and not suffering any consequences. Our IT director took a hard line on the topic and tried to speak openly to reporters about how much the request offended him. He got as far as the school newspaper as in 2005 most people didn't understand the ramifications of this activity.
adrr 13y ago
You're not allowed to talk about NSLs, i recommend you change your post. Whats really bad about NSLs is they last forever, even a decade after receiving one you still can't talk about it without risking prosecution. NSLs issued in 2002 have no bearings on any active case yet we can't talk about them publicly. This makes it really hard to have a public debate on their usage.
- tsunamifury 13y ago
  Was not an NSL as that would be turning over data on a specific individual. This was a request to install hardware to collect all data at any time.
snowwrestler 13y ago
And yet here you are talking about it. (My point with this comment is to point out a contradiction--you can't prove that silence clauses work by talking about a real example of one.)

thrownaway2424 13y ago

Please throw out an estimate of how big you think a mirror of all Google's network traffic might be.

adamdavis 13y ago
And this is relevant to what?
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  It's relevant because some of the things that are being suggested here on HN are clearly infeasible, from an infrastructure standpoint.
  - adamdavis 13y ago
    Word. I get that. I just thought the question sort of steered away from the main point of the parent comment, which was that if Google did have some sort of nefarious partnership that they would be legally obliged to deny it no matter what. My apologies, I'm probably just being a bit nitpicky.
  - Finster 13y ago
    O RLY? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
- minwcnt5 13y ago
  I think his point is it would be extremely expensive. The leaked presentation claimed the cost of PRISM was only $20M.
  - akiselev 13y ago
    PRISM is clearly not the whole picture. The Utah Data Center alone is much more than $20M a year and PRISM's specified purpose was using US IT infrastructure to intercept foreign communications, which would presumably be filtered from a large data set. The bulk of the data transmission and storage costs are probably under another budget
rosser 13y ago
The NSA's Utah data center was designed to host more storage than existed on the entire planet at the time. Sheer volume of data is among the least of their concerns.
- thrownaway2424 13y ago
  OK, so you can read wikipedia, but does it make any sense? A single 65MW datacenter with only 100ksqft of machine room space can hold all of the data in the world? That's not even as much power as one of Facebook's facilities in Oregon. Remember when IBM announced they'd built the largest filesystem in history? That was only 120PB. A YB is 10 million times bigger than that. Consider also that a YB is 1000x the entire storage industry output from 2012. So under your theory there is a parallel hard disk drive industry consisting of at least 99% of all hard disk production on Earth.
  - jonknee 13y ago
    Facebook's servers spend most of their time finding, sorting and then transmitting bits to the billion people who use Facebook. Storing a bunch of data and storing a bunch of data that needs to be dynamically assembled in real time for a billion users are two very different things. Regardless, no one has theorized that the NSA storing yottabytes of data. The (still probably crazy) rumors are zettabytes.
    - thrownaway2424 13y ago
      "no one has theorized" that except for Wikipedia, Wired magazine, C-Net, and most of the people commenting on this thread. "NSA to store yottabytes in Utah data centre" -- http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/nsa-to-store-yottabytes-in-utah-data-centre-49304118&#x2F http://crave.cnet.co.uk/gadgets/nsa-to-store-yottabytes-in-u...;
  - mullingitover 13y ago
    >" A single 65MW datacenter with only 100ksqft of machine room space can hold all of the data in the world? That's not even as much power as one of Facebook's facilities in Oregon." You're off by a factor of 10-15 on the square footage. Per the wiki page, "The planned structure is 1 million or 1.5 million square feet."
ImprovedSilence 13y ago
the social "who's talking to who, and what sites did they visit" information... oh, probably this big -> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
- saalweachter 13y ago
  I'd like to point out that their upper capacity limit, "a trillion terabytes", would require approximately 1 trillion hard drives, probably at a cost of $10-$100 trillion. I feel comfortable saying that they have not built out to that scale yet.
_stephan 13y ago
They don't need to access to all network traffic, just the interesting bits, like e.g. the internal traffic for the storage/backup systems used for GMail or Google Accounts .
jonknee 13y ago
Big. But the NSA has been sucking in ridiculous amounts of data for many many years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnivore_(software)

bluedino 13y ago

Why would they bother asking you, when they could simply ask your ISP? Why ask each customer?

jessaustin 13y ago
Presumably university IT would have been able to provide more precise demographically identifying data than the ISP. It's unlikely the ISP was running the RADIUS server.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- tsunamifury 13y ago
  You're right, I hadn't considered that. Identifying individual students within public areas of the network was only possible through the schools ID system. Otherwise public access would be anyones guess as to who was using the computer.
tsunamifury 13y ago
The program and requirements were somewhat surreal. The architecture of the plan seemed to make little to no sense. They considered anyone who provided internet access to 100's of people a provider (mostly universities etc) and requested that they install the pre specified hardware at their own expense (purchase, installation and maintenance). They may have been concerned specifically with universities due to their foreign students and access to certain backbone lines that normal ISP's dont always have (WWW2?). I spoke with the EFF and I was told I wasn't alone, but most people were rejecting the 'request' and not suffering any consequences. Our IT director took a hard line on the topic and tried to speak openly to reporters about how much the request offended him. He got as far as the school newspaper as in 2005 most people didn't understand the ramifications of this activity.

adrr 13y ago

You're not allowed to talk about NSLs, i recommend you change your post. Whats really bad about NSLs is they last forever, even a decade after receiving one you still can't talk about it without risking prosecution. NSLs issued in 2002 have no bearings on any active case yet we can't talk about them publicly. This makes it really hard to have a public debate on their usage.

tsunamifury 13y ago
Was not an NSL as that would be turning over data on a specific individual. This was a request to install hardware to collect all data at any time.

snowwrestler 13y ago

And yet here you are talking about it. (My point with this comment is to point out a contradiction--you can't prove that silence clauses work by talking about a real example of one.)