Thread: Another nomination for this week's "Not Getting It" award.

Somewhat on topic...it's pretty amazing how many different tracking sites there are that you don't know are tracking everything you do online. It's scary how many of them get attached to you, even just doing your daily web browsing.


https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/fir...don/collusion/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/d...lfmcfigp?hl=en

You can use either of those addons to get a good feel for it and block the unknown ones.

The funniest thing about this video isn't that this congressman is so ignorant that he thinks Google is capable of doing what he is saying... It's that he should already know the government is already doing this (monitoring the content of email and other communication and accessing the personal information of anyone who is communicating online) all by themselves and really doesn't need Google's help.

Assuming he was talking about gmail or mail that passes through gmail, then he is correct that they COULD do it. They just don't.

As for the government doing it currently. Well... Lets just say that if you believe that the government can monitor 100% of every email that passes into, through, and out of the US then you have a fundamental flaw in your understanding of how the internet works. That would require software/hardware at EVERY edge router in the country.

So let's scale that back because I know they don't have that sort of equipment and software at any of MY edge routers. Lets say that they just have it at all Tier 1 providers. That would be your AT&T, Level 3, XO Comm, Centurylink, etc. Now I don't believe that they do have that sort of hardware/software at all of those locations because it would be impossible for them to keep it quiet. Network engineers are notoriously picky about letting people fuck with their networks, and when someone does they become rather vocal about it. And I've only seen one semi-credible story from a tier 1 admin that said that the government had it's own room in their facility. That story smacked of tin-foil hat propaganda to me at the time too. But lets just assume they do for simplicity sake.

I'll choose Chicago as the base point for a Tier 1 provider as an example. So we'll say they have their nefarious monitoring device in Chicago on the AT&T fiber ring. AT&T provides bandwidth to dozens of tier 2 providers. We'll call one of them T2 Communications. Of those, they may provide bandwidth to dozens more tier 3 providers who would be your local carriers and any ISPs that might have interconnect agreements WITH those local carriers. We'll call a couple of those Joe's Crabs and Internet, and Bobs Mortuary and Internet. Joe's and Bob's for short.

So in Town 1 you have Joe's and in Town 2 you have Bob's. For the moment we'll just deal with Town 1 and Joe's. You and all your local buddies live in Town 1 and you email the SHIT out of each other. Guess what. None of that email ever leaves Town 1. The email server sitting at Joe's processes the email and passes it to all of those local friends. Even T2 Comm never sees any of that traffic. But now you want to send some email to a couple buddies you have living in Town 2 who have Bob's internet service. Ok. Joe's email server goes "those guys live outside my network so lets send it OUT." T2 Comm at that point comes into play and goes "Hey, I see you have email that would go to Bob's block of IPs." and forwards it on to Bob's. Bob's email server then sends it to your buddies in Town 2. Again... That traffic never leaves the T2 Comm network and thus never hits the AT&T fiber ring where Nefarious Government Snoopsoft sits and monitors for email terrorists.

Only if you sent an email that went outside the T2 Comm network would it ever hit the AT&T network and get Snoopsofted. So unless T2 Comm relented to getting Snoopsoft installed too... and then Joe and Bob also agreed... NOTHING within those networks ever get snooped.

Now lets scale it back again because I do not believe that the government has their own sub-noc within every Tier 1 data center. Lets just say they have one at most strategic points... Chicago, St Louis, LA, Atlanta, maybe Dallas, Denver... That could cover a significant portion of any non-local email, but really... what's the point when you start losing huge chunks of data at that point?

No... HERE is the most likely story. The government CAN and DOES contact the ISP of a suspect and tells them they want ## months of email and/or traffic information for user X. I believe ISPs are supposed to keep records for a certain amount of time on their users' internet activity. Some do and some don't. Some refuse to do so. When I was the admin of a national level tier 3 provider we refused. We were subpoenaed a few times and we just told them we didn't keep records on our users. They can also stick their Snoopsoft hardware/software into the ISP with a court order to then packet sniff that user.

But country-wide Snoopsoft? Not really feasible to catch more than a fraction of traffic.

hehehe "screwgle"

One thing that sticks out to me is the congressmen was asking the question of "Does google read my emails?"
The response was, its automated. Which means to me that at some point in Googles history, someone Did read our emails. To get something to be automated it must first be un-automated. So in essence There was a point to his question albeit not well enough explained.

Originally Posted by SmokenScion

One thing that sticks out to me is the congressmen was asking the question of "Does google read my emails?"
The response was, its automated. Which means to me that at some point in Googles history, someone Did read our emails. To get something to be automated it must first be un-automated. So in essence There was a point to his question albeit not well enough explained.