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Comment by senordevnyc | Hacker News Reader

Does the NSA even have the ability to monitor all AI traffic like this? Wouldn’t that require tons of data centers that there literally hasn’t been time to build yet? I really have no idea, maybe the asymmetry of the compute required to monitor is way lower than the compute required to serve inference?

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"AI Traffic" is just traffic. If the infrastructure exists to monitor/buffer traffic (it does) then this can be monitored as well. Whether this hiccup was due to them hitting their limits briefly (or turning it on, or etc) who knows.

I bet it's even negligible traffic compared to e.g. Netflix or YouTube. Even a 'huge' context window is nothing compared to the random library of a basic Web page.

Not once you de-dup.

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

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

I dont think it requires a lot. I think of them as data hoarders more than anything else. It doesnt seem out of their capabilities to store a ton of chats. Maybe they're having scaling problems with the increased data rates they're hoarding and it led to an outage.

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

it's fair to say they do and have for ages... it's not that hard to assume a well trusted TLS cert is under their control.

What does having a "well trusted TLS cert" enable for them in this case, exactly?

Having a magical cert doesn't mean you can just intercept everything.

On the contrary, it lets you MITM encrypted communications by swapping the website's original certificate for the "well trusted TLS cert"

No, it doesn't. HSTS and other methods prevent this from happening.

HSTS doesn't protect you from this at all. It only requires HTTPS, which a spoofed-but-trusted cert passes just fine.

No mainstream browser (or any browser?) is doing cert pinning.

What "other methods" are there that are deployed and actually in use?

Transparency logs. It's mandatory for a cert to be in CT logs for browsers to trust it. Those are public, if this was happening, someone would have noticed already.

grep is pretty fast

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