On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 04:05:35AM +0200, Martin T wrote: > Hi, > > I watched "Citizenfour"(imdb.com/title/tt4044364/) documentary and at > 41:12 Edward Snowden gives a brief overview of some of the leaked > documents to journalists Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill. At 42:57 > Snowden mentions devices which are able to collect data at rate of > 1Tbps. This was in 2011. Screen-shots from the movie can be seen here: > https://nsa.gov1.info/dni/2014/tumult.jpg Third slide looks like some > sort of vendor product roadmap :) > Just out of curiosity, what kind of equipment those might be? Is it > realistic that NSA/DoD are able to produce their own hardware? Let > alone custom silicon like Cisco or Juniper are. Or do they use off the > self hardware.. In addition, it's relatively easy to install a passive > fiber optical tap for a submarine cable, but how do you get > information out of it? I mean all the different wavelengths(CWDM/DWDM) > within the same cable, line rates(up to 100GigE), circuit switched and > packet switched technologies which those devices should support.. In > addition, how(bandwidth and network wise) to transport this data to > data analysis and storage equipment if it collected far away from > USA.. > Some of those questions or thoughts might be naive and stupid, but > that's what crossed my mind when I watched the documentary. Maybe > somebody, who has done more research in this field, could clarify.
NSA has had in-house chip fab facilities for at least 10 years, probably closer to 20, and possibly as much as 30, as well as working agreements with big network gear manufacturers. -- Mike Andrews, W5EGO [email protected] Tired old sysadmin
