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Comment by res0nat0r | Hacker News Reader

Can we stop every new thread on HN with NSA spy stories? The NSA can/has/is spying on you for a long time and it has nothing to do with any US company. Much of the traffic around the world (bound for the US or not) is routed through the USA due to us being such a central player, and these core routers have been tapped for a long time.

It doesn't matter if you are dealing with "US company" or not.

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With most threads, your request would be perfectly reasonable, but this is a technology designed specifically to keep your communications private. There aren't many threads where bringing up the NSA would be more relevant than it is here.

P2P is definitely a viable solution that makes their job significantly more difficult.

It's not nearly that clear what the NSA is doing. I've worked in the NOC and as a datacenter tech at a Regional ISP and we definitely did not have spying gear in our facilities. We had other, regional BGP peers so it's entirely likely your traffic never crossed the Internet to get to its destination. I'm still not convinced they've tapped a significant fraction of anything.

The Internet is a complex decentralized network and the NSA most certainly doesn't have the physical resources to tap more than a small fraction of it.

I'd consider it at least slightly more likely for major ISPs.

Why else would Comcast route traffic from the western part of the Mountain time zone all the way to Chicago or Dallas before going to a destination in California or Washington?

Google is a long-time NSA collaborator. The risks of what they could share with them should always be scrutinized.

I don't think collaborator is a good term here, it is implying they are secretly giving up US citizens for some evil nefarious purposes to the government. I'd label them as a US based company that is complying with US law.

A distinction without a difference?

Germany is a long time NSA collaborator. If Europeans wanted to they could handle intelligence themselves they could, they don't want to.

This. People forget global intels are collaborating in many forms.

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