NSA surveillance may cause corruption of US computing economic

SOURCE: http://http://www.fnotw.org/Article/Full/5967

Internet experts had warned about recently moves by many countries and predicted a breakup in US computing economic in the next few years.


(FNOTW) -- At the moment, many countries in the world, such as Brazil and Germany, had started a campaign encourage regional online traffic to be routed locally rather than through the US. This trend is likely to be the first steps in a fundamental shift in the way the internet works. The change could potentially hinder economic growth.

Brazil's government has published ambitious plans to promote Brazilian networking technology, encourage regional internet traffic to be routed locally, and is moving to set up a secure national email service.

In India, government employees were advised not to use Gmail for sensitive documents exchange and get used to paradoxical trend of typewriter rather than computer typing when comes to secret document.

Similarly, in Germany, the privacy commissioner associated with a group of large companies raised publishes awareness by a campaign of Europe internal data transmission systems to get out of reach of US surveillance.

A conference named Internet Governance Forum was held in Bali last week aimed discuss basically the "sustainability, robustness, security, stability and development of the internet", however, surveillance issue seems to attract more attention of representatives from 111 counties in the world.

Notably, Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation in Washington, presented convincing augment on how did internet communication corrupted by NSA revelations. As the vast scale of US surveillance operations, countries around the world were considering laws that would attempt to keep data in-country, threatening the cloud system – where data stored by US internet firms is accessible from anywhere in the world. This will push a huge change in big company operation as the extra cost for internal changing and loss cloud computing and customer data benefits.

As a sum of Castro’s report, US cloud computing will potentially lost $35 billion by 2016 if clients all over the world withdraw due to the development of local internet security services.

Large internet-based firms, such as Facebook, Yahoo and Apple, have already raised concerns about the impact of the NSA revelations on their ability to operate around the world.

 

Wow, where to even begin!

Now this may sound impressive to those with little to no computer experience or knowledge, to anybody else it is just plain silly! But here, let me take it apart piece by piece.

I have absolutely no idea what that even means. Who, what experts?

Now this is such a fundamentally stupid claim, I am amazed that anybody who knows anything about TCP/IP would write something like this.

Internet traffic is addressed and forwarded by IP addresses, 4 groups of numbers from 0 to 255. They are addressed rather randomly, not by country ot anything else. And when your message goes out, it goes from router to router from source to destination, following the shortest and fastest route. The country it is to and from does not matter at all.

So if the fastest connection from Germany to France is through the Denmark and the UK, it will go Germany-Denmark-UK-France, never mind that seems like the long way, it is not for data traffic. And if the fastest way from Argentina to China is through the US, then it will go through the US first.

And another bit of information, your data most of the time follows many different paths simultaneously. To make it easier to understand, imagine you are loading a web page with video, text and photos. The text may to one way, the video a second way, and the video a third way - all depending on current bandwidth use and the amount of bandwidth available.

So if somebody is claiming that they can do this, they are quite frankly on crack (unless they are a country like China or North Korea, where all Internet goes through the government).

And what is "regional Internet traffic"? Once again, it is simply data, 1s and 0s, random numbers while enroute from one place to another. In order to do that they will have to basically replicate the Internet locally, then isolate it from the Internet so they can control and monitor all the traffic (like China and North Korea).

This will make it slower, not faster.

Oh, and there is no such thing as "secure email".

Nobody should use email or the internet for sensitive documents in the first place. That is mistake #1. Anybody that handles sensitive information on any computer connected to the Internet is a fool, and a double fool if they send it through the Internet, no matter what email service they are using.

And once again, unless it is a totally closed system this is impossible. The moment the data hits the first router, it will route itself to it's destination by the use of metrics that mostly look at number of hops required, and the bandwidth available. Country is not even part of the metric at all.

IGF is a largely meaningless group that is basically hoping that the UN will take charge of the Internet. Nobody really pays much attention to them, they will have as much luck trying to get their agenda passed as you would herding cats.

Once again, nice words but largely meaningless.

Data is data, it is 1s and 0s, nothing more and nothing less. It travels from here to there, and anybody can get inside the loop and compromise it.

To give an idea, if you were able to access a theoretical satellite that allows India to send it's Internet traffic (like say INTELSAT) and were able to load a software payload telling it to duplicate all data traffic and route the copy to another IP address, then it will do that. Or if you can spoof one set of routers with your own IP you can then pass along traffic and capture it at the same time. And it is not all that hard, hackers use the second technique all the time. You can even crash the router, then have your own jump in pretending to be the one that is down.

This is not rocket science, and anybody claiming it can be otherwise is peddling snake oil.

Once again, meaningless claims.

Try this little experiment. Do a "Trace Route" from your computer to Press.tv. This is the propaganda site for the Iranian government. Here, I will even make it easy:

Command for Windows machines:
tracert www.press.tv

Command for Unix/Mac machines:
traceroute www.press.tv

I just did it myself, data leaves my location (San Francisco), goes to San Jose, then to New York. Then it goes across to the UK and bounces there some more.

If you want to actually see it, try this:

http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/visual-tracert/

Same principal, but shows you on a map the route a packet takes. And run it every few seconds, and you will notice it changes depending on what connection is fastest at the moment.

Sorry, as an IT professional with over 30 years in the field (my first professional certification was in 1996, for Novell 3), this "article" is not even worth the electrons used to image it on the screen.

 

It is simple enough, it is saying that due to American spying other countries are going to reform the way that their Internet works. They will be avoiding routing thru America and having servers there so therefore an economic downturn in the American computing economy.

Actually the country to country thing matters a lot and that is why countries like Brazil and others will not be using servers in America and will be bypassing American Internet firms to use their own supposedly more secure firms.

As an IT professional for 30 years you seem not to be able to grasp a pretty easy concept.

 

The only problem is, that is impossible.

When a packet leaves a location, it hops the quickest way towards it's next en-route destination. It can't really be forced to take a specific path. Your packet leaves France, goes to England, then hops a satellite to Canada. Now it is going to Vladivostok, how is it going to get there from Canada? There is no way possible to put in a bit saying "Do not go to the US", so it simply takes the next hop to the US, then to Russia.

Please tell me, what part of the IP4 packet describes that it is not to be routed through a specific country?

Simple answer, there is no such thing. Such a command is impossible and worthless.

But thank you for showing the absolute lack of knowledge that you have for how IP4 works, and how data is routed. Now go away.

But please, explain to me where this information would be stored in an IP4 (or IP6) packet.



Since you are obviously such an expert in Internet Routing and packet configuration, surely you can explain it to somebody like me. And how would this possible interface with Layer 2 of the OSI model?

 

The surveillance topic is BS because EVERYONE spies through the internet and i am saying this without having the slightest sympathy for the US .

Unless you switch to intranet there is no way you can confine data.

I would agree that the internet needs to be more decentralized , after 11/9 we didn't had internet because the cable was off , after an earthquake in Algeria again we didn't had internet because the cable from NY was damaged .

 

No it is not because the Brazilians are already doing it.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/brazil-dilma-rousseff-internet-us-control

 

Planning and doing are two very different things. Nothing has been done about their plan (which is basically to beg the UN to take the Internet away from the US).

Here is the funniest part about that claim... nobody owns the Internet. Nobody controls the Internet. The Internet controls the Internet.

That is nothing but political crapola, in the world of 1s and 0s it means nothing.

Now Sudo begone.

 

It means nothing to you of course but it means everything to the Brazilians who do not want their population spied on by America.

 

OK, then please explain to me where in the IP4 or IP6 stack this information will be placed, to ensure that it will not be routed through the US?

Come on, you are such a know-it-all, this should be child's play for you. I also would like to know where in the ISO model you are going to place this information, so it can be transmitted to downstream routers.

Come on, you seem to freaking know everything, this is actually a very simple question. So tell me how this will be done?

 

It will be routed thru their own servers in Brazil. Brazil will have its own Internet, easy as that, my link says it all really, try reading it.

The South American nation has suggested forcing internet firms to open data centres in Brazil, which would be used to store locally generated material.

It is also pursuing a plan to build a new internet cable.

The project would offer a way for data to bypass the US.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24145662

 

And thank you for confirming that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. You are simply arguing from the need to argue. If you actually know anything or not.

 

Posting silly pictures is not making a good argument, it actually represents a failure on your part to understand what is happening in Brazil. It is not my fault that you do not understand.

 

Oh, trust me... I do understand.

I my friend have been in the IT industry for over 30 years. I have decades of experience in Transmission Control Protocol - Internet Protocol, understanding both how it works, and how it is routed. I can spend hours explaining the IP stack, and how different layers of the OSI model interact.

And what you say is impossible. I even gave you a stack, and asked you where this information would fit in. I even explained what layer this would have to work in, and you could not tell me how it would work. In short, you know nothing of which you are talking about.

Routers simply transfer data from one point to another, determining what the fastest course is. Period. It is not by country, it is not by type of transmission. Once this data leaves the source, it is on it's own. And absolutely nothing would stop it from going to the US if that was determined to be the shortest route by a router once it leaves it's starting point.

Here, run some tests yourself, you might be amazed.

http://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/visual-tracert/

I picked a site and did the proxy trace, to see what came up. I wanted to know the route to afghangovernment.com. This is what came up:

1. comcast.net United States
2. comcast.net United States
3. comcast.net United States
4. comcast.net United States
5. comcast.net Canada
6. 66.198.127.14 Canada
7. as6453.net United States
8. as6453.net Canada
9. as6453.net
10. telia.net
11. telia.net
12. 198.199.99.242
13. 192.241.192.253
14. 198.199.99.242
15. telia.net
16. telia.net United States
17. Level3.net United States
18. Level3.net United States
19. Level3.net United States
20. Level3.net United States
21. Level3.net United States
22. Level3.net United States
23. Level3.net
24. unifiedlayer.com
25. 192.254.190.32

Now let me break this down for you, and I will make it as simple as I can.

The ping packet left my home, and for the first 5 hops stayed in the Comcast network, until it emerged and went to the Internet for forwarding. Then at hop 6, it jumps to Canada for 2 hops. Then it returns to the US, then goes back to Canada where it is forwarded to France on hop10. There it bounces around a bit, until it hits the public address of the server that site rests on, and the public IP address of the actual website (192.241.192.253, hop 13). Then it starts it's return journey, bouncing around some more until it gets back to the US at hop 17, and back to my gateway at hop 25.

Now let me try another one, this time president.gov.af. This one actually has an AF country code, so it really will go to Afghanistan:

1. 192.241.192.253 United States
2. nlayer.net United States
3. nlayer.net United States
4. nlayer.net Germany
5. tinet.net
6. tinet.net Netherlands
7. tinet.net
8. 95.167.93.55 Russian Federation
9. rostelecom.ru Uzbekistan
10. 195.69.190.98 Uzbekistan
11. 195.69.190.246
12. 180.94.92.34
13. Unknown

Wow, this one is a bit different. I did not get the return trace, but look at it's path. From the US to Germany, then the Netherlands, then Russia, Uzbekistan, then finally to Afghanistan.

And running this 3 times in a row, I got other nations in the path, including Canada. In fact, one went to Canada, to France, back to the US, then to Germany before hitting Russia.

1. comcast.net United States
2. comcast.net United States
3. comcast.net United States
4. comcast.net United States
5. comcast.net Canada
6. 66.198.127.14 Canada
7. as6453.net United States
8. as6453.net Canada
9. as6453.net
10. telia.net
11. telia.net
12. 198.199.99.242
13. 192.241.192.253 United States
14. nlayer.net United States
15. nlayer.net United States
16. nlayer.net Germany
17. tinet.net
18. tinet.net Netherlands
19. tinet.net
20. 95.167.93.55 Russian Federation
21. rostelecom.ru Uzbekistan
22. 195.69.190.98 Uzbekistan
23. 195.69.190.246
24. 180.94.92.34
25. Unknown

As you can see, there is absolutely no control of how the data is sent once it hits "the Internet". None, it just grabs the fastest route available (not based upon speed or distance or number of hops, but what seems to be the best at that instant in time).

So please, tell me how this would change, and how. What you are talking about is clearly impossible, and anybody with more then a basic understanding of networking would know this. But feel free to tell me how it would be done.

 

It seems not but at least with your supposed 30 years IT experience you can post silly pictures and a long load of drivel unrelated to what I posted.What do you not understand about Brazil having their own Internet? Everything it seems.

 

That is an Intranet, not Internet. It would be akin to what China has, or a service like CompuServe, The Source, or AOL prior to the Internet being opened up to the public.

They are not the same thing. And yes, anything on the Intranet is private, big whoop-de-do. The moment it leaves the Intranet and goes to the Internet, that is gone.

 

Wrong. It is the Internet,they are laying their own cables, they are just by passing America. I have explained it and shown two links to back it up and you still do not get it.

 

And then what? This is what you just fail to understand.

OK, so the cable jumps out in say Portugal. Great, fine, wonderful. So it bypassed the US. Big whoop-de-do. Look at the example I gave you earlier.

That packet may now well travel from Portugal, to Germany, then to the US before going to it's destination. Once Brazil ties it into the Internet, all control is gone.

So please, tell me how they would prevent this from happening? Or from Afghanistan to stop packets from traveling to Russia, or anything else! It is 100% impossible.

But I am done with this, you obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Welcome to trollville.

 

You obviously know nothing about this at all as proven by your posts about it. You do not even know what they are doing, so here you go learn something.

Meanwhile, BRICS companies are working to create a "new Internet".

In particular, Brazil has been reported to be building a "BRICS cable" that will create an independent link between Brazil, South Africa, India, China and Russia, in order to bypass NSA cables and avoid spying.

The cable is set to go from the Brazilian town of Fortaleza to the Russian town of Vladivostok via Cape Town, Chennai and Shantou.

The length of the fiber-optic cable will be almost 35,000 kilometers, making it one of the most ambitious underwater telecom projects ever attempted.

http://rt.com/news/brazil-brics-internet-nsa-895/

You claiming that this is an intranet just further proves your lack of knowledge and calling people names just means you are angry that you came to a debate and lost because you did not know what was being talked about.

 

You just crushed this guy, but he doesn't care. He is right because he says he is right.

 

I know. This guy is a complete troll, who obviously has no concept as to how the Internet actually works. And I tried very simply to explain how data moved from one place to another.

And I did not even go into more complex things, like how data packets are actually routed from location to location though other protocols like RIP, BGP, OSPF, EIGRP (which is Cisco only), or any of the 2-3 dozen other routing protocols.

And in not a single one of those can you lay out anything but your next hop. But he claims a new pipe layed to Russia will keep everything from the US.

And the dismissal of my examples of real Internet hops are "meaningless"... that made me laugh actually. Packets going from the US to Canada, France, back to the US then to Germany before reaching it's destination. To most people that seems crazy, but that is how computers route everything on the Internet, from the cat videos on YouTube to e-mail to your uncle Harvey to this very web forum.

I myself have multiple certs, from Novell 3 in 1996, to my MCSE in NT4 in 2000. It became obvious that joke (sorry, jkotan) had no idea what I had said when I was talking about protocols and OSI model, and he was talking about secure datapipes going around the US. When I was talking about what makes an Intranet and Internet, and he was saying I was wrong. That absolutely did make me laugh.

And the biggest laugh?

In particular, Brazil has been reported to be building a "BRICS cable" that will create an independent link between Brazil, South Africa, India, China and Russia, in order to bypass NSA cables and avoid spying.

This has me absolutely rolling, rolling. The NSA does not spy from cables. That has been dead and obsolete for like 20 years now. Only idiots who think we are sending the Internet across old copper cables that you could vampire tap would believe that. You can't just "tap" a fiber optic cable.

And you don't need to. That is what makes this even more funny to me, because if tan joke had bothered to read my earlier posts (or try to understand them), he would have caught the meaning when I said the easiest way to "steal data" is at the router. If I was to simply insert proprietary code into my gateway router (for those in Rio Linda, that is what connects my computer to the Internet), and instructed it to copy every packed going in and out and forward it to some other IP address in addition to routing it through the Internet, I have done the exact same thing.

No cutting of cables needed, all the information you want or need (and I am not going to even begin to explain the difficulties of trying to splice in a FOCA cable un-noticed). That RT article was almost complete nonsense, and anybody with a more then passing knowledge of how the Internet works will spot that immediately.

And I am still waiting to find out how anybody would add instructions to an IP4 or IP6 datapacket to prevent it from being routed anywhere once it left their Intranet.

 

You just failed to hold up your very silly arguments, you did not know what you were talking about,anyone can see that from your posts and now you are running around calling me names when supposedly you are supposed to be ignoring me. LOL.

Wrong again.

People knowledgeable about Google and Yahoo’s infrastructure say they believe that government spies bypassed the big Internet companies and hit them at a weak spot — the fiber-optic cables that connect data centers around the world and are owned by companies like Verizon Communications, the BT Group, the Vodafone Group and Level 3 Communications. In particular, fingers have been pointed at Level 3, the world’s largest so-called Internet backbone provider, whose cables are used by Google and Yahoo.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/26/technology/a-peephole-for-the-nsa.html?_r=0

You really know nothing about this subject as can be seen yet again.

A top secret United StatesNational Security Agency map shows that the US and its “Five Eyes” intelligence partners tap high speed fibre optic cables at 20 locations worldwide. The interception operation involves cooperation with local governments and telecommunications companies or else through “covert, clandestine” operations.

http://www.theage.com.au/technology...s-australias-asian-allies-20131124-2y3mh.html

You were saying Mushroom????? HA HA. How can one person be so wrong again and again..embarrassing.

 

Well, this individual is banned, but here is the answer that others may be interested in even if he never bothered to read them.

Notice that the taps into fiber optic cables all "involved cooperation with local governments and telecommunications companies". Now why exactly is that? If they were just tapping the cables out in the middle of nowhere, why would they need such cooperation?

The answer here is obvious, they would not. They would do it like they did to the Soviets back in the cold war. These "taps" were not just someplace along the length of the cable, but where it tied into the local communications network. At the routers and repeaters. Or if you have sophisticated enough equipment in place, you can employ a beam splitter and get the same effect with no electronics directly involved. Think of it as a mirror, sending all data to 2 locations, one the Telco, the other to whoever wants the copy.

Either way, it is the same result. For the equipment you need to cooperation of local government and ISPs.

No need to tap or cut anything. You simply get their permission to drop a "black box" in the line before the router, and there you have it. Copies of everything going through that cable is now copied and forwarded wherever you want.

 

The third facepalm must be for "compeltly". Oh, the irony.

 

A US federal court issued an injunction Monday barring the US government from collecting plaintiffs’ data in accordance with a US National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance program revealed to the world by fugitive NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Although due to national security concerns the injunction has been stayed pending appeal, presiding Federal Judge Richard Leon of the US District Court in Washington DC stated: “I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval,” adding that James Madison – viewed widely as the "Father of the US Constitution" – would be “aghast.”
http://rapsinews.com/judicial_news/20131217/270135748.html

 

Many Western countries participate in similar spying. This is not something limited to the United States, it's global. It was just a big story in the United States. Also, we like to have a go at the Yanks from time to time so we tend to ignore our own surveillance programs.

Many of the countries getting peeved over the US's involvement are only peeved because they spied on their government. They have no problem actively participating in spying over their own citizens, in fact they are usually participants themselves.

[hr][/hr]

We can't stop them doing this. It will persist. Rather, we should seek to take the ability away from them. Don't ask for your freedom, take it!

• Encrypt your HDD with full disc encryption software (Truecrypt, Ubuntu FDE, etc)
• Use a more secure operating system (in order of ease of use: Ubuntu, Fedora, Tails, Qubes OS)
• Encrypt your internet traffic with a reputable VPN that uses strong encryption (PIA, TORGuard, etc)
• Avoid sites that collude with government, use alternatives (Startpage instead of Google, avoid Facebook, etc)
• Use HTTPS encryption where available (HTTPS Everywhere is a good Firefox/Chrome add-on for this purpose)
• Avoid using real life information like your name or address, don't use the same username across multiple sites (I'm guilty of this one).
• Treat computer security as an enjoyable hobby rather than as a chore.
• Opt for reputable open source alternatives to proprietary, closed source software.

You're never going to be completely secure, but most people are basically giving their information to governments and advertisers. It doesn't take much effort to significantly increase your security.