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"The net effect is that NSA analysts look at 0.00004% of the world's traffic in conducting their mission – that's less than one part in a million." Weird how d
by GHFigs 13y ago
"The net effect is that NSA analysts look at 0.00004% of the world's traffic in conducting their mission – that's less than one part in a million."
Weird how direct quotes from leaked documents sound less bad than the articles about them.
- opendais 13y agoI hate to point out the obvious but valuable NSA-type traffic is text and voice...I doubt they care 'bout youtube and netflix streaming traffic. I'm sure in 'absolute terms' that statement is true but it is a lie of omission. I'd be willing to bet 0.00004% is probably close to 100% of all the metadata that crosses a router used by a US-based ISP or an international fiber line owned by a US company. :P
- DanBC 13y ago> but valuable NSA-type traffic is text and voice...I doubt they care 'bout youtube and netflix streaming traffic. You don't think they monitor YouTube for terrorist video? You don't think they monitor other video sharing sites for video of terrorist organisations releasing propaganda? That seems like useful intelligence, and they'd be foolish to ignore it.
- monkeyspaw 13y agoWhat if they just ran their calculations something like this? Suppose a 10MB youtube video is watched 100x. That's 1GB traffic. The NSA could record the video (10MB), then simply record who watched it (maybe a few dozen MB in http headers, etc -- call it 40MB) They could report they only monitored 50MB of 1,000 MB, or 5%. If the video was watched 1,000x, they're "monitoring" around .5%. 10k views, they're monitoring .05%. Pretty easy to see how they can report a true number that also doesn't reveal the extent of their wiretapping.
- TheLegace 13y agoDid you read the article? "However, critics were skeptical of the reassurances, because large quantities of internet data is represented by music and video sharing, or large file transfers – content which is easy to identify and dismiss without entering it into systems. Therefore, the NSA could be picking up a much larger percentage of internet traffic that contains communications and browsing activity. Journalism professor and internet commentator Jeff Jarvis noted: "[By] very rough, beer-soaked-napkin numbers, the NSA's 1.6% of net traffic would be half of the communication on the net. That's one helluva lot of 'touching'."
- GHFigs 13y agoI read the article and rejected its assertions as speculative horseshit, yes. What of it? The original document cites a figure (1862 petabytes) and two percentages (1.6% and 0.00004%) of that figure. The math is not hard.
- john_b 13y agoThe assertions in the article are not "speculative horseshit". In 2011, Netflix+Youtube+BitTorrent alone were over 50% of internet traffic [1], and all three have likely grown since then. The NSA has no interest in the vast majority of this traffic. The exact numbers are speculative because nobody has data accurate enough to determine them with any real certainty, but the point is that the NSA is misleading the public about the extent of its surveilance by orders of magnitude. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/17/netflix-largest-internet-traffic/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/17/netflix-largest-internet-tr...
- GHFigs 13y agonobody has data accurate enough to determine them with any real certainty You mean, other than, y'know...a classified document by the NSA describing what proportion of estimated total internet traffic they look at?
- bandushrew 13y ago