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Comment by bastard_op | Hacker News Reader

Show me any large US ISP, and I'll find you a locked room few know about with government network sniffers that sit at the head of all regional traffic to get a copy of everything going in and out there. Everyone does it, but like fight club, no one talks about it. If they're not in yours, it's because they've already gotten upstream of traffic to see it all anyways.

The problem comes with sifting through the data, but now that you have tireless AI doing that work for tired humans, who's to say what they actually don't see.

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Doesn't even have to be big.

Years back I was touring a local datacenter that was more than a bit quirky, but their offer was basically that they had fiber loops into the main carrier hotel a few blocks away. This was useful because the guy than ran the carrier hotel wouldn't even return your email unless you were from BigCo.

But anyhow, walking around he pointed out one cage and said something like "And that's the NSA's cage, we don't ask what they do haw haw." At the time I mostly thought he was just exaggerating or joking around. But later after revelations of the scale of bulk collection I had to wonder if it really was true and simply banally that much in the open.

Hah, I only say large as anything smaller they're already getting you somewhere at your provider's provider.

Room 641A was known to the security community long before the Snowden leaks.

In fact it even had a Wikipedia article a number of years before them: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Room_641A&oldid=6...

So much was revealed in the European Parliament's ECHELON report back in 2000 that I found it hard to understand why Snowden made the big splash that he did. It all seemed pretty old hat to me.

The chattering classes love counter-cultural packaging. That is why they embraced Greta Thunberg much more than they embraced Al Gore despite the messaging being the same.

The ECHELON report revelations were packaged into a formal (boring) European Parliament report. Meanwhile Edward Snowden had the counter-cultural packaging of a cool dissident hacker.

In 2006, Mark Klein working for AT&T leaked it. It was in the news.

Snowden did his leak way later in 2013.

And the Utah data center that stores days worth of the entire Internet and then they just keep the most interesting parts and the parts they can't hack into for later analysis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

At least as of a few years ago, AT&T still owned most of the core network in the US and leased it out to other ISPs. The government has a direct pipe into AT&T which allowed (still does?) them to sniff everything regardless of ISP since AT&T almost certainly owned the underlying pipe.

The government spooks aren’t at the ISP level…remember the AT&T whistleblower…

https://www.wired.com/2006/05/att-whistle-blowers-evidence/

could see these "statistics" being used to gauge to public response to political decisions. That's pretty dystopian. "President Biden, the 'data' shows your response to Palestine was not very popular".

This world where the people running the government care what the populace thinks about their decisions reads like a utopian fantasy.

It's not popular with me. We should be providing Israel with far more JDAMs.

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