Expect more lines in the future to bypass the U.S.
If there was ever any doubt that there’s no privacy on the Internet, the latest nuggets from Edward Snowden’s trove of documents detailing U.S. electronic spying efforts should remove it. Stories on the ProPublica.org website and in the New York Times show how telecommunications companies have cooperated with the National Security Agency to trawl emails that pass through their systems, regardless of where the messages originate or where they are destined. According to the ProPublica story, AT&T was singled out in the documents for its “extreme willingness to help” the NSA…
In September 2003, according to the previously undisclosed NSA documents, AT&T was the first partner to turn on a new collection capability that the NSA said amounted to a “‘live’ presence on the global net.” In one of its first months of operation, the [AT&T-run surveillance] program forwarded to the agency 400 billion Internet metadata records — which include who contacted whom and other details, but not what they said — and was “forwarding more than one million emails a day to the keyword selection system” at the agency headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland.
The original documents are posted alongside the ProPublica story, and make for interesting reading. Slide presentations show how an email sent to Brazil from Iran will naturally pass through a commercial server in the U.S., due to “international choke points”, “least cost routing” and other perfectly ordinary technical characteristics of the Internet.
It’s not just compliant telecoms companies that give the NSA this immense trawling capability. It also results from the fundamental architecture of the Internet, which is largely centered in and managed by the U.S.
Expect far greater international pressure to change this status quo as a result of these revelations. Even friendly countries will want alternative data paths that don’t pass through U.S. hands.