On Sat, Mar 22, 2014 at 7:18 AM, TGLASSEY <tglassey@earthlink.net> wrote:
I want to ask you folks something...
How do you as the people operating the network think two exabytes of data gets pushed across your networks to each of the PRISM Collection Sites (daily) with no one noticing... Know what I mean>?
Todd Glassey
I'm sure you're aware there's no such thing as "the network". There are thousands of individual networks, with no high level correlation happening between them. It's trivially easy for an entity wanting to stay somewhat inconspicuous to buy a few dozen waves from provider A, another bunch from provider B, another bunch from provider C, etc. At the end of the day, they've amassed a significant chunk of bandwidth; but unless the providers all get together and start comparing customer lists, circuit locations, delivery dates, etc. nobody is going to realize that all the small individual orders add up to one very big monitoring and collection infrastructure. Thanks! Matt PS--unless my math is off the mark, 2 exabytes a day works out to less than 200Gbps sustained. Even allowing for uneven distribution across the day, a 1Tbps network is almost trivial to build these days without incurring undue notice from providers, especially if you split it across 3 or 4 providers.