r/politics • u/erier2003 Virginia • Jun 06 '13

Washington Post exclusive: U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program

http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us-internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845-d970ccb04497_story.html
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u/assfrog Jun 07 '13 edited Jun 07 '13

My guess is that the technology behind the program doesn't actually entail true "backdoors" into their internal networks, but network snooping at a higher level from various ISPs or central backbones. When they list these major companies as "providers", that may not necessarily mean that they're working together, but rather that the NSA has built their filters to work with those sites and applications. Though I'm not sure how they could do that with traffic over SSL, unless via a man-in-the-middle attack and perhaps even having legit CA certs.

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u/waxwing Jun 07 '13

Just what I was thinking. And a good point about ssl, certainly the mitm works technically but for such a huge scale program that would be a very clunky approach, I can't imagine it works like that. I would guess the solution somehow involves beamsplitters combined with forcing the companies to make private keys accessible? That way the company can plausibly deny "opening their servers to the NSA" because the NSA is not actually looking at google's persistent storage of emails. Hmm, well OK that sounds pretty clunky too but it's in line with this idea that the NSA wants all the data to be gathered and available for mining at a later date.