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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: government eavesdropping
On Fri, 25 February 2000, [email protected] wrote: > Except that for the most part, MAE connections are switched, not "shared" > media. As such, they'll see Broadcasts, and packets destined for the > monitoring equipment and little else. The aggregate bandwidth of the MAE > makes them using a SPAN port virtually impossible. If memory serves, the > MAE traffic is several times 100Mbps. SPAN ports were not always infeasible and certainly are quite feasible at a lot of smaller exchange points. And all kinds of things could be happening inside an ATM exchange. And the spooks are happy to get any traffic at all; they don't need 100% of it and cannot get 100% of it in today's Internet structure. All they need is a little inside help to get great piles of interesting traffic from taps within a large provider or within an exchange point. And there is still the possibility of tapping the fiber directly at least two ways that I know of. Governments spying on their citizenry is just a fact of life in the modern age. The key thing is to make sure that they do not abuse this power or this data but that is politics, not technology. --- Michael Dillon Phone: +44 (20) 7769 8489 Mobile: +44 (79) 7099 2658 Director of Product Engineering, GTS IP Services 151 Shaftesbury Ave. London WC2H 8AL UK
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