[telecom] Credibility Crunch for Tech Companies Over Prism

In article , Bill Horne added:

Seems pretty accurate to me. I think you're a bit out of touch with how people (especially those younger than you or I) use online services. Most people are pretty oblivious to the privacy implications of handing all their data over to an unaccountable third party (or if not oblivious, value convenience more than individual liberty).

-GAWollman

I don't count the gossip, celebrity worship, petty vendettas, or other material I've seen on email queues and facepage sites as being in any sense a "secret" or "personal"; AFAICT, it's just banal keyboarding done by self-absorbed children.

The WSJ reporter hyped his story by pretending that anyone over the age of Thirty would care which child "hooked up" with which: it's the classic "Film at Eleven!" puffery that characterizes your local "If it bleeds, it leads" Eyewitless News.

Bill

On 6/9/2013 11:52 AM, Monty Solomon wrote:> [...]

Has everyone already forgotten NSA's Echelon and the Russian's SORM?

I believe we've had a thread on this before in comp.dcom.telecom in which I posted numerous relevant URLs since I maintain a personal archive regarding Echelon and SORM because it interests me.

Regarding the above's "They don't have direct access to the company computers", that's very true because they don't need direct access.

Why?

Because the NSA taps all Internet backbones worldwide along with all radio and telephone traffic worldwide, so anything going to/from Google and all other ISPs and providers and anyone else is already intercepted using fiber prisms on ALL fiber backbones everywhere on Earth, and that's "just" Echelon. Russia's SORM-IV is similar.

As I posted previously, here's an article about the NSA tap on AT&T's US West coast fiber backbone (and there are many more such articles) with this one from the San Francisco Chronicle dated November 7, 2007:

The NSA all-world-backbone taps are again confirmed in this article dated May 4, 2013:

Everything is now being stored at the NSA's Utah facility which has a yottabyte capacity (1 trillion terabytes or 1 quadrillion gigabytes) which is why they needed the ZFS filesystem being developed at the DoD's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories (LLNL); info here:

and

and this one as an "only" 50 petabytes test bed:

Info about the NSA Utah data center is here:

Thad

***** Moderator's Note *****

It's nice to know that when Big Brother tells me to face the Telescreen, I'll be able to answer "Which one"?

Bill Horne Moderator

Um, a yottabyte is a quadrillion terabytes - you're off by 3 orders of magnitude.

I know people have thrown around the idea of the Utah facility being yottabyte class storage, but that's about the technology they're using (such as ZFS as you mentioned), not what they actually have. A yottabyte is a couple hundred times larger than the entire estimated size of the internet. There is no present technology that could pack that much data into their datacenter and still access it. A solid block of micro-SD cards with the cases removed wouldn't fit. *

Oops, you're right. Thank you for the catch -- a second set of eyes is always helpful! :-)

Using this URL as a reference and doubly-checked elsewhere:

I created the following table (with a printed copy on the wall beside my desk) that others may find useful, too. A fixed-width font should be used to view or print this:

Byte (8 bits): 1 byte Kilobyte: 1,000 bytes Megabyte: 1,000,000 bytes Gigabyte: 1,000,000,000 bytes Terabyte: 1,000,000,000,000 bytes Petabyte: 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes Exabyte: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes Zettabyte: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes Yottabyte: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes Xenottabyte: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes Shilentnobyte: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes Domegemegrottebyte: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes

Further checking reveals these ZFS limits confirmed by multiple sources:

Max. file size: 2^64 bytes (16 Exabytes) Max. number of files: 2^48 Max. filename length: 255 bytes Max. volume size: 2^64 bytes (16 Exabytes)

I'm sending email to the sources from which I found incorrect information; thank you again for your reply.

Thad

No, Paul, you seem to be using the British "-illions" nomenclature which differs from how "-illions" are expressed in the USA (and possibly in the rest of the world), thus my original statement was correct for a Usenet group hosted in the USA.

Referring to an extract of the table I constructed after your comment:

[...] Terabyte: 1,000,000,000,000 bytes [...] Yottabyte: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes [...]

a yottabye is clearly 1 trillion terabytes.

We don't know that since the total volume of the Utah facility is not public knowledge. When one examines this 50 Petabyte test bed at LLNL for the ZoL (ZFS on Linux project), it's fairly small, only 1.5 times larger than the refrigerator in my kitchen.

Deploying 10000s of those in a multi-level underground facility is not an issue; I've personally seen 1000s of cabinets 20 years ago at an Amdahl facility in Sunnyvale CA to physically test the max possible configuration (CPUs, selector channels, etc.) and it was all on one floor in a medium size building, so I can readily believe the NSA will have at least one yottabyte of storage in that Utah facility. CERN is going to be needing something similar as more new experiments proceed at the LHC gathering terabytes of information per second.

Thad