"The net effect is that NSA analysts look at 0.00004% of the world's traffic in conducting their mission – that's less than one part in a million."
Weird how direct quotes from leaked documents sound less bad than the articles about them.
Weird how direct quotes from leaked documents sound less bad than the articles about them.
"However, critics were skeptical of the reassurances, because large quantities of internet data is represented by music and video sharing, or large file transfers – content which is easy to identify and dismiss without entering it into systems. Therefore, the NSA could be picking up a much larger percentage of internet traffic that contains communications and browsing activity.
Journalism professor and internet commentator Jeff Jarvis noted: "[By] very rough, beer-soaked-napkin numbers, the NSA's 1.6% of net traffic would be half of the communication on the net. That's one helluva lot of 'touching'."
The exact numbers are speculative because nobody has data accurate enough to determine them with any real certainty, but the point is that the NSA is misleading the public about the extent of its surveilance by orders of magnitude.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/17/netflix-largest-internet-tr...
You mean, other than, y'know...a classified document by the NSA describing what proportion of estimated total internet traffic they look at?
No one cares about the data of the YouTube videos you watch, the content and images and JavaScript and CSS and what-have-you of the web pages you visit, the content of the files you download etc. Examples of what would be of interest, and only comprises a tiny portion of all web traffic, is
* All URLs you request (will include your search history)
* The contents and headers (and maybe attachments) of your e-mails
* Your online IM conversations
* _Concievably_ the video from your video calls, but this is too much data to store
* Arguably any data transmitted through a text form online
Again, the interesting data is only a tiny portion of all web traffic, because the rest is transmitted repeatedly and can be recreated on demand. Much of the interesting stuff is, in fact, in the "metadata".
Yes, exactly! And the document in question even states what that percentage is.
I'd be willing to bet 0.00004% is probably close to 100% of all the metadata that crosses a router used by a US-based ISP or an international fiber line owned by a US company. :P
You don't think they monitor YouTube for terrorist video?
You don't think they monitor other video sharing sites for video of terrorist organisations releasing propaganda? That seems like useful intelligence, and they'd be foolish to ignore it.
Suppose a 10MB youtube video is watched 100x. That's 1GB traffic. The NSA could record the video (10MB), then simply record who watched it (maybe a few dozen MB in http headers, etc -- call it 40MB)
They could report they only monitored 50MB of 1,000 MB, or 5%.
If the video was watched 1,000x, they're "monitoring" around .5%. 10k views, they're monitoring .05%.
Pretty easy to see how they can report a true number that also doesn't reveal the extent of their wiretapping.