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Comment by reactordev | Hacker News Reader

It goes deeper than that. The U.S. Government funds it, discourages other nations from using it, and spies on all web traffic as a result of it.

Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA. Within a quick drive to Langley, Quantico, DC, and other places that house three letter agencies I’m not authorized to disclose.

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> Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA

Nobody who understands the scale of the internet could possibly believe this is true.

Routing internet traffic through a geographical location would increase ping times by a noticeable amount.

Even sending traffic from around the world to a datacenter in VA would require an amount of infrastructure multiple times larger than the internet itself to carry data all that distance. All built and maintained in secret.

Never tapped a port, eh?

Edited to not be so flippant: I work in HFT/finance where recording all traffic is required I think by law and definitely for one's own sanity. We're able to maintain nanosecond trades while capturing ALL the traffic. It has zero impact on the traffic. This is normal, widely used tech. Think stuff like Ixia passive taps and/or Arista Metamako FPGA-based tap/mux devices.

> Never tapped a port, eh?

I have. I have a background in high speed networking.

Have you ever paused for a moment to consider how much infrastructure would be required to send 80% of data on the internet across the country and into a single datacenter in Virginia?

If you've worked in HFT, you can probably at least start to imagine the scale we're talking about.

It’s not a single data center, it’s about 200 of them.

Just minutes ago you said this:

> Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in Northern VA

Where are you getting this new 200 numbers? Share a source please.

One of…

Ashburn, VA is the data center capital of the world.

When you type and hit submit, even on this site, your data will hit one of those data centers.

The few exceptions are government networks and China.

So you're saying my french ISP tunnels all traffic from my hotel to my office through to America?

Or are you saying that the NSA has a hidden tap on the equipment without my ISP knowing. How does that traffic get from the ISP router to the NSA?

I’m saying your ISP isn’t being entirely forthcoming about what goes on on their networks… take that as you will.

So every ISP in every country in the world is feeding thousands of terabits of data to a hostile American intelligence agency. Not just netflow, the actual contents, and not a single ISP employee has actually come out with this evidence.

I can believe IXPs in many countries will send netflow data to their state's intelligence org, but that's a long way from what was being suggested.

Another way to think about it, many websites the data gets transmitted before you hit submit, between various type ahead reactive frameworks, soft keyboards with networked spell checking, your AI powered mood ring, always listening smart watch/car/home etc. Grandad always said don't say anything on the radio you wouldn't say in public, well we're up to don't think out loud or see how your crazy idea looks in text before you edit the Mel Gibson tones out of it. Tinfoil hats are off, on, locked!

I have no data or information on the topic, but the use of English was fine for the apparent intended meaning:

"Almost 80% of communications go through a data center in X"

Does not mean that all traffic goes through a single data center in X. Just that it goes through one of potentially many data centers that happen to be in X.

You're right. It's fantastic to see how English comprehension is decaying, even in groups that supposedly are smarter than average. There's a fast decaying tendency in language comprehension overall, and I can only point to the fact that much of the new generation is unable and unwilling to read even a single book.

https://broadbandbreakfast.com/dateline-ashburn-data-centers...

“Loudoun County currently has 199 data centers, with another 117 in development, according to Michael Turner, vice chair of the board of supervisors transportation and land use committee and Ashburn’s district supervisor.”

https://virginiabusiness.com/loudoun-county-advances-changes...

the time it takes for light to travel from los angeles to virginia is 12 - 16 ms, round trip is 30ms lets say - that is a noticeable delay, and it could be easily disproven that 80% of traffic is literally routed through VA

now.. could they just copy the traffic and send it to VA on a side channel? probably?

And how useful would this information be? srcIP:port_dstIP:port pairs with almost all traffic encrypted. Pretty boring from a sigint pov.

Instagram, YouTube, misc Web traffic, and torrents, with a side of minutae.

I'm certain the three letter agencies yearn for the days before letsencrypt was de facto.

There is the small possibility that the NSA has found cracks in some of the popular cyphers and could actually make sense of the encrypted data. It's not completely out of the question, their cryptanalysis has been shown to be ahead of the public best efforts in the past. They demonstrated it back in the 70s with DES S-boxes hardening them against a technique no one publicly knew about until the 80s.

What the point if they can have decrypted data from cloudflare?

i used to work, 15 years ago, on a (permissive, not covert) monitoring service for a UK national public service, the NHS spine core. We used switches to mirror ports and capture traffic in promisciouse mode on a few dozen servers split across a few datacentres that all the traffic went througg. We had certs installed to decode https. We could get enough hardware to do this step easily, but fast enough storage was an issue, we had 1 petabyte of usable storage across all sitesn that could hold a few days of content. We aimed to get this data filtered and forwarded into our central Splunk (seperate storage) and also into our bespoke dashboards within 60s. We often lagged...

You can only decode those https certificates if you are mitming them (and have a compromised certificate)

A copy of the certificate and private keys won't help thanks to the magic of Diffie–Hellman, you can't passively (assuming you haven't got a practical quantum computer) read the stream

Your company will have deployed root certificates to devices and run as a MITM. This is standard corporate firewall behaviour.

It's also possible to generate ephemeral keys deterministically, e.g. key=hash(escrow, sslrandom).

But you are only tapping your own data that's already passing by you not? Not 80% of the internet that has nothing to do with you.

The point they were making was that you could tell via ping times if the traffic was literally being routed through VA unnecessarily because the extra unavoidable light speed delay that extra distance would add between a user and the server if they weren't already very near to VA. Could be mirrored via the type of monitoring you're talking about but that'd only get you mostly encrypted traffic unless the 90s cypherpunk paranoia turns out to have been true.

Just because your client is in Switzerland and your data center is in Germany, doesn’t mean a data center in Virginia doesn’t have a copy.

https://youtu.be/JR6YyYdF8ho

That was 14 years ago…

We have MUCH more capabilities today.

Do you have a single actual source for anything you’re saying about this happening today?

I’m well aware of the historical surveillance programs. I’m asking for a source for all of your claims about what’s happening today regarding 80% of internet traffic.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c93dnnxewdvo

As for traffic, I can’t cite numbers, you’ll just have to trust me when I say it. I can’t give you packet breakdown or IP4 vs IP6. To have that discussion requires a secret clearance at least.

Let’s be serious for a minute here. If you’re claiming to have secret clearance on an Internet forum, you don’t.

You may be surprised how cavalier some people are about their clearance.

Secret is also like... really common to have. 5 million people or whatever.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37681554

You have clearance enough to imply that these things are going on but not enough to actually prove anything? Surely the requirements of your clearance would come with some basic terms like "don't use winks and nudges to implicate us in vast conspiracies on public forums," or the far more simple "don't mention this to anyone."

Have you seen the kinds of people that the US government has employed recently?

I suspect many in DOGE were given high levels of security clearance based on their ability to create dank memes on x

That claim makes no sense in today's world. For over a decade, the likes of Youtube, Netflix and short form video make the majority of throughput. Why in the world would anyone want to monitor known catalogs of content? Most of which are delivered by POPs in data centers distributed all over the world.

The datacenter is in Utah, not Virginia.

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

That’s cold storage

Right, where the copies are stored.

It's referring to us-east-1

Sure, but the specific NSA datacenter that stores copies of every piece of data that transits the internet is in Utah, not Virginia.

He was likely referring to the claim that 70% of the internet flows through Loudon County, Virginia, where AWS us-east-1 is located, although the more accurate number is probably somewhere around 22%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudoun_County,_Virginia#Econo...

Every cloud provider worth talking about is there too. Both public and sovereign/gov data centers.

And of course all the privately owned ones too. It is bananas. Not just because of government either - low ping times to the biggest population center of North America.

> Nobody who understands the scale of the internet could possibly believe this is true.

Neither would anybody have believed that 8 out of 10 hard drive chips can contain any rootkits. Yet, here we are, and the insanity of it is that we've found lots of malware attributed to EQGRP, and the Snowden leaks (from the perspective of Booz Allen) have confirmed it.

You should read up on quantum routing.

They don't have to route through any specific location if they can just infiltrate the routers of your neighbors. Any data packet from the originating server will arrive slower at your location than the data packet of your neighbor. In that scenario TLS becomes pretty useless if the CA itself is also exchangeable, because you can't rely on TCP or UDP. Ironically the push for UDP makes it much easier to implement in the underlying token ring architectures and their virtual routing protocols like VC4 and later.

That's how the internet and a star topology (or token ring topology on city level) was designed.

I wish I could upvote this more than once.

> Neither would anybody have believed that 8 out of 10 hard drive chips can contain any rootkits. Yet, here we are

I haven't heard this before. Do you have any links I can read on this?

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

Check the snowden leaks for IRATEMONK and TAO (tailored access operations) related documents.

Speed of light establishes certain latency minima. Experimental data can falsify (or not) at geographical locations far enough from VA.

Correct but local governments using Palantir will need to provide it to them somehow.

https://amp.dw.com/en/german-police-expands-use-of-palantir-...

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2025/12/15/us-tech-...

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/feb/05/calls-to-ha...

https://theweek.com/tech/palantir-influence-in-the-british-s...

https://digitalrightswatch.org.au/2026/02/01/palantir-in-aus...

Mmmmkay…

"Going through" doesn't necessarily imply store and forward. It could be tapped elsewhere and shipped to WVA. fwiw the idea of running a network in order to tap it is hardly new. The British operated largest telegraph network in the world in the 1800's for that reason.

You think there's an entire shadow infrastructure across the United States or world that carries 80% of all internet traffic all the way to VA?

It would have to be several times larger than the internet infrastructure itself due to the distances involved.

All built and maintained in secret?

No. That isn't required at all. Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

> Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume

No, I understand networking hardware quite well actually. I'm also familiar with Room 641A. Room 641A did not capture 80% of internet traffic. If you think 80% of internet traffic could be routed through Room 641A you're not thinking about the infrastructure required to get it all there. It was a targeted operation on backbone lines that were right there.

While the most well known, there are other points of presence doing the same thing. Easy and trivial to duplicate traffic at line speed. It doesn't affect the traffic flow itself.

They will never believe you until you show them and that requires a clearance.

A decent number of people reading this probably do have secret clearance. But that's not really the relevant point.

Simply having secret clearance doesn't mean you can just go digging around arbitrary secret classified info that you have no business reading. And it certainly doesn't mean that discussion can be had on hackernews.

No need for a clearance, merely explain that

1. fibre-optic traffic is a beam of light

2. this beam can be passed through a glass prism…

3. the prism splits off say 20% of the light by intensity

4. this 20% is identical to the 80%

5. both the 20% and 80% component are 'bright' enough to be used

6. the 80% continues on its merry way, the 20% is redirected for 'other' uses.

That is simplifying it to the point of a lab experiment. It’s a bit more complicated but yes, you can split light and route that light anywhere you want.

Yes you can trivially tap a fibre -- https://www.gigamon.com/products/access-traffic/network-taps... for example

You can even do this without breaking the fibre

What you can't do is ship 80% of the traffic across the world to the US without either the ISPs agreeing, and thus a conspiracy of thousands of people in thousands of ISPs, or doing it outside the data centres, meaning millions of taps in various ducts around the globe, which would be found on a daily basis.

You just don't have imagination. Google, just by itself, controls 89% of the traffic in the Internet. And we know that the government can get any information they want from them, without even asking too much. If you combine this with other major companies operating very close to the US government, it is probable that more than 95% of the web traffic outside China that is easily within reach of these sinister 3 letter organizations.

> Google, just by itself, controls 89% of the traffic in the Internet.

This is completely false and it should be obvious to anyone thinking about it critically.

Are you confusing search engine query share with internet traffic?

Most of the replies to this seem to think it's referring to some kind of secret government datacenter. It's us-east-1, and every other cloud provider's US East and GOV zones, which are all in NVA

So they… drive the data around NOVA?

No, but if you want to collaborate with the federal government it makes it more convenient to be located where the federal government resides.

No, but you can visit a “clean room” and look at the data at any number of sites.

When I worked for a CLEC (during that moment in history when they were briefly a Thing), we had a USG closet at our main datacenter, and we are nowhere even close to NoVA. I expect they still handle it this way rather than try to funnel any significant amount of traffic to a particular geographical region.

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