Threat Level has an absolutely fascinating article about the topology of the worldwide data network and how it has given the NSA a windfall of easy surveillance access:
While nobody outside the intelligence community knows the exact volume of international telephone and internet traffic that crosses U.S. borders, experts agree that it bounces off a handful of key telephone switches and perhaps a dozen IXPs in coastal cities near undersea fiber-optic cable landings, particularly Miami, Los Angeles, New York and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Miami sees most of the internet traffic between South America and the rest of the world, including traffic passing from one South American country to another, says Bill Manning, the managing partner of ep.net. “Basically they backhaul to the United States, do the switch and haul it back down since (it’s) cheaper than crossing their international borders.”
And internet traffic traveling from Asia to Europe crosses the entire breadth of the United States, entering in Los Angeles, and exiting in New York, says Woodcock.
For voice traffic, the NSA could scoop up an astounding amount of telephone calls by simply choosing the right facilities, according to Beckert, though he says NSA officials “make a big deal out of naming them.”
“There are about three or four buildings you need to tap,” Beckert says. “In L.A. there is 1 Wilshire; in New York, 60 Hudson, and in Miami, the NAP of the Americas.”
This suggests a slightly-less sinister explanation for what the NSA is doing in those secret rooms they’ve been building in telco facilities. It’s conceivable that what they’re doing is not eavesdropping on Americans, but scooping up foreign-to-foreign traffic that’s passing through American communications hubs. And if that’s the case, it’s quite likely that the Bush administration didn’t want to go to Congress because they didn’t want to tip off foreign governments that they were doing this.
I don’t think I buy that last bit, though. Foreign governments aren’t stupid. They know perfectly well how their country’s traffic gets routed, and they wouldn’t be dumb enough to transmit sensitive information via unencrypted links that pass through another country. So it sees unlikely we’ve managed to extract terribly much information about foreign governments from tapping these connections.
Obviously, intercepting foreign communications can also be extremely valuable for spying on terrorists. But there the case for secrecy isn’t as pressing. Terrorists surely already expect that they’ll be spied upon on almost any communications network around the world, so the revelation that American networks are tapped isn’t likely to change their behavior much. Moreover, one imagines that foreign governments would be perfectly willing to enter into intelligence-sharing agreements with regard to terrorist activities.
Of course, the fundamental question is how much civil liberties are worth. If you really don’t think they’re important, then even the slight advantage of secrecy outweighs the concerns of that crazy ACLU. But if, on the other hand, you think that the Fourth Amendment is a valuable part of America’s heritage of freedom, then we ought to be willing to make the intelligence community’s job slightly more difficult in order to preserve those basic values.
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