A scary FISA what-if....

[crimsonblue]

As we all know, the new FISA legislation allows warrantless wiretapping of any communication involving an overseas participant. As it is being construed is that this only applies if one or more participants are physically located outside the borders of the U.S. However, what if domestic communication were routed overseas and then back again, say a mile or so over the border into Canada and back to the U.S.. Would these qualify as foreign communications? If so, you can bet your ass that the NSA is currently engaging in this as an end around the law, and is probably colluding with the Canadian (or others) government to do this. Think about it: 1. The NSA has access to the AT&T infrastructure, through which runs roughly 1/2-2/3 of entire global internet traffic. 2. The NSA determines that is is illegal to wiretap domestic-only communications. 3. The NSA reroutes the communications to Canada or overseas, before transmitting the communications back to NSA headquarters. 4. Since the communications were, at any time, outside U.S. borders, they are classified as international communications. 5. The NSA now begins monitoring ALL global traffic, domestic or otherwise.

This is a big what-if theory, but from my limited knowledge of the NSA, this is: a) very feasible, and b) probable to likely. IBM has a 1Pflop supercomputer (the roadrunner) up and running-- which was built, incidentally, for the U.S. military. The NSA most assuredly has supercomputers that are at least 2-3 times more powerful. Why is this computing power important. The extreme spreed of these supercomputers means that the NSA has the shear power to run more than 10^18 operations a second; in layman's terms, this computer could run the ENTIRE backbone of the internet as a mere application, much like you run Firefox or Word. By being able to simultaneously run all of the data, filtering and sorting become much more easy.

In effect, the NSA has computers capable of sorting every single email being sent right now, along with with every webpage being looked at, and every bank transaction currently underway. 128, 192, and 256-key Encryption technology does slow them down, but as we approach 2-5 Pflop machines, the time needed for successful brute force attacks reduces to a number of days, hours, minutes (down from centurys or millenia).

Scary, isn't it? Anyone with more knowledge about supercomputers or the NSA feel free to comment below, or PM me if you have something especially juicy.

As an added bonus, here's a youtube of the NSA supercomputer cooling system

[glowing]

1. If anyone doesn't think the NSA doesn't have a lockdown on every single

communication around the world, your crazy... its all about how one can use the info and if it is legal.. but this has been going on and will continue to go on as long as their is communication that can be observed.

[crimsonblue]

2. I found a good article

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/preemption/nsa.html


This gives some good insight into the NSA supercomputers.

[ColbertWatcher]

3. Technically, it doesn't even need to go over the border and back...

...as long as the powers that be interpret the law to mean that "satellite" communication is technically "overseas" or "outside U.S. borders".

[robinlynne]

4. This is not a what if. This is what one of the civil cases was about. there is an AT&T whistleblower

who said they built a building in sanfrancisco which reroutes all calls overseas and back for exactly that reason.

[Crabby Appleton]

5. Copied and pasted from bill 6304

`(b) Limitations- An acquisition authorized under subsection (a)--
`(1) may not intentionally target any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States;
`(2) may not intentionally target a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States if the purpose of such acquisition is to target a particular, known person reasonably believed to be in the United States;
`(3) may not intentionally target a United States person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States;
`(4) may not intentionally acquire any communication as to which the sender and all intended recipients are known at the time of the acquisition to be located in the United States; and
`(5) shall be conducted in a manner consistent with the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

[crimsonblue]

6. an excerpt from the link I supplied above

Can you give us any idea of what the scale of the NSA's supercomputing operation is, what they're capable of handling?

The NSA doesn't measure computers in computing power; it measures them in acres. That's how they talk about their computers: how many acres of computers they have. ... We're talking about millions of processors that can work on a single problem simultaneously. The amount of computing power is phenomenal. It's just staggering. ...

The important point here is that what we're talking about, especially with data mining, is not a distributed computer network, where you have lots of different computers working on things. Data mining would require that there be a database that would be centralized ... (in which data would) probably be collected from lots of other databases. I call this database OBAD: One Big-Ass Database. ... The NSA is really the only facility that could subject that database to the kind of algorithmic massage that would be necessary to come to conclusions about the threat levels, for example, every American represented. ...