Only 1 person here has remarked on the opening clause of this sentence In its foreign intelligence mission. The NSA isn’t supposed to have a domestic intelligence mission, is it? And if it does, what percentage of traffic does it touch “in that mission” ? Moreover, as citizens (and US residents), we don’t really care specifically about the NSA or any other specific government agency, we care about the totality of government activity. If the government builds systems that provide access to 100% of US internet traffic, and several different agencies tap into different parts of that, it makes no difference really that the NSA alone might only “touch” 1.6% of it “in its foreign intelligence mission”. There currently seems to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that this is indeed what has happened.
I also note that there is a lot of convenient ignoring of the implications that every nation is entitled to go way beyond its domestic internet surveillance activities when it comes to foreign traffic. From a national self-interest perspective, it may be possible to justify this. However, it completely fails to notice that friendly nations can do each other’s spying for them, not to mention the general moral climate when all internet based communication is subject to analysis by many agencies of many nations around the world.
I agree, NSA mission creep. It is not just the NSA. It’s everyone else and if its everyone else then that could put many criminal court decisions on the line. Remember, they let Ellsberg go because FBI bad actions. All the three letter agencies require frying sunlight and a thorough bleaching. A big message needs to be sent, jail the spies and anyone involved. I don’t know how to get there but I know it’s possible.
Over 50% of traffic is video streams, nearly all of that is just movies/tv/youtube. They would try hard not to look at much of that because it is almost all just media serving.
23% is “web” which is surely overwhelmingly static content, particularly images from the top 1000 web pages.
20% or so is “peer to peer”. This seems to be mostly file sharing (legal or otherwise), so again the bulk data is almost always uninteresting.
So that’s 93% of traffic which is overwhelmingly uninteresting and probably easy to classify as such. I’m sure there are other significant bulk filter categories.
1.6% of all traffic really starts to look a lot like a huge slice of what would be potentially interesting. A plausible range of 25-100% of potentially interesting information examined at some level, given the assumptions that its is 1.6% of traffic and that this type of filtering does work.
I’m concerned about how the bitmessage clients store their private key. I have to read some source code. I just started looking at bitmessage. The general state of password and key management is a disaster. Getting security right is very hard. Also, bitmessage itself is untested.
