Hi, I watched "Citizenfour"(imdb.com/title/tt4044364/) documentary and at 41:12 Edward Snowden gives a brief overview of some of the leaked documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill. At 42:57 Snowden mentions devices which are able to collect data at rate of 1Tbps. This was in 2011. Screen-shots from the movie can be seen here: https://nsa.gov1.info/dni/2014/tumult.jpg Third slide looks like some sort of vendor product roadmap :) Just out of curiosity, what kind of equipment those might be? Is it realistic that NSA/DoD are able to produce their own hardware? Let alone custom silicon like Cisco or Juniper are. Or do they use off the self hardware.. In addition, it's relatively easy to install a passive fiber optical tap for a submarine cable, but how do you get information out of it? I mean all the different wavelengths(CWDM/DWDM) within the same cable, line rates(up to 100GigE), circuit switched and packet switched technologies which those devices should support.. In addition, how(bandwidth and network wise) to transport this data to data analysis and storage equipment if it collected far away from USA.. Some of those questions or thoughts might be naive and stupid, but that's what crossed my mind when I watched the documentary. Maybe somebody, who has done more research in this field, could clarify. thanks, Martin