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The Internet United States Communications Government Privacy

NSA 'Traffic Shaping' Can Divert US Internet Traffic For Easier Monitoring (zdnet.com) 78

schwit1 shares an article from ZDNet: A new analysis of documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden details a highly classified technique that allows the National Security Agency to "deliberately divert" U.S. internet traffic, normally safeguarded by constitutional protections, overseas in order to conduct unrestrained data collection on Americans. According to the new analysis, the NSA has clandestine means of "diverting portions of the river of internet traffic that travels on global communications cables," which allows it to bypass protections put into place by Congress to prevent domestic surveillance on Americans.

The new findings follow a 2014 paper by researchers Axel Arnbak and Sharon Goldberg, published on sister-site CBS News, which theorized that the NSA, whose job it is to produce intelligence from overseas targets, was using a "traffic shaping" technique to route US internet data overseas so that it could be incidentally collected under the authority of a largely unknown executive order... The research cites several ways the NSA is actively exploiting methods to shape and reroute internet traffic -- many of which are well-known in security and networking circles -- such as hacking into routers or using the simpler, less legally demanding option of forcing major network providers or telecoms firms into cooperating and diverting traffic to a convenient location.

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NSA 'Traffic Shaping' Can Divert US Internet Traffic For Easier Monitoring

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  • by Drakonblayde ( 871676 ) on Saturday July 01, 2017 @10:40AM (#54725033)

    Leave it to the NSA to co-opt a QoS term for what is, in essence, an MitM technique

  • Curious re-use of something we saw several years ago -- showing yet again, there's (almost) nothing new under the sun. From a previous write-up I did:
    For several days in in March 2010, erroneous or malicious router messages originating from state-owned China Telecom instructed Internet carriers that their connections were the fastest available worldwide. Automated acceptance of these instructions caused portions of traffic to be diverted through CT networks, effectively subjecting some U.S. Internet us

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