NSA's Lucky Break: How the U.S. Became Switchboard to the World

Wired Threat Level contributor Ryan Singel has a powerful piece up today, complete with infoporn. He explains:

A lucky coincidence of economics is responsible for routing much of the world's internet and telephone traffic through switching points in the United States, where, under legislation introduced this week, the U.S. National Security Agency will be free to continue tapping it.

Leading House Democrats introduced the so-called RESTORE Act (.pdf) Tuesday that allows the nation's spies to maintain permanent eavesdropping stations inside United States switching centers. Telecom and internet experts interviewed by Wired News say the bill will give the NSA legal access to a torrent of foreign phone calls and internet traffic that travels through American soil on its way someplace else.

But contrary to recent assertions by Bush administration officials, the amount of international traffic entering the United States is dropping, not increasing, experts say.

Link

• [Simon Greenwood]

  I love the way that US legislatiors have to have nice acronyms for their laws. A better one for this act would have been the Federal Use of Communication Controllers Act (I couldn’t think of a word that fitted the context and began with K).

• [mikelotus]

  Hey Nigerian, are you aware that companies like Yahoo have servers overseas so that Europeans can access Yahoo on local servers? Nice try though assuming American company meant servers all located here.

• [Anonymous]

  If you don’t want someone else to read your email, don’t rely on the fact that wiretapping is illegal. Use encryption.

• [bour3]

  But contrary to recent assertions by Bush administration officials, the amount of international traffic entering the United States is dropping, not increasing, experts say.

  Never any citations. As usual, just uncheckable accusations delivered orbiter dicta.

  Wired is weird. Make up your minds already;

  A lucky coincidence of economics is responsible for routing much of the world’s internet and telephone traffic through switching points in the United States…

  And yet;

  The United States, where the internet was invented, was also home to the first internet backbone. Combine that architectural advantage with the pricing disparity inherited from the phone networks, and the United States quickly became the center of cyberspace as the internet gained international penetration in the 1990s.

• [NigerianWriter]

  I agree with President George W. Bush and I disagree with the so called experts who said that the international traffic entering the US is dropping. Because, there are wrong.

  61 billion searches were conducted last August and American Internet companies had most of the traffic.

  Top 10 Search Properties Worldwide*
  August 2007
  Total World Age 15+, Home and Work Locations*
  *Source: comScore qSearch 2.0
  Searches
  Search Property (MM)
  Worldwide 61,036
  Google Sites 37,094
  Yahoo! Sites 8,549
  Baidu.com Inc. 3,253
  Microsoft Sites 2,166
  NHN Corporation 2,044
  eBay 1,319
  Time Warner Network 1,212
  Ask Network 743
  Fox Interactive Media 683
  Lycos, Inc. 441

  The searches mean more international traffic online. And most of the searches were coming from outside the US.