On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 5:09 PM, Theodore Ts'o <[email protected]> wrote: > On Tue, Nov 05, 2013 at 10:01:58AM -0500, Phillip Hallam-Baker wrote: > > The payoff for this effort is a major increase in work factor and in > > particular, forcing an adversary attempting a traffic analysis attack to > > intercept and decrypt multiple fire hoses. 40Gb/sec is quite a lot of > data > > to store. It is over an exabyte per link per year. Or about a quarter > > million 4Tb hard drives. Or $200 million at $500 per drive (including > > racking etc.) > > That's assuming the attacker is going to attack link-level security > --- which to me sounds like the French assuming the Germans would make > a full frontal assault on the Maginot Line. > > It would seem that a much more intelligent thing for the adversary to > do is to force/induce/send a national security letter/FISA warrant so > as to put the tap between the decryption gear and the default-free > zone router. >
And then when the packets cut across multiple jurisdictions, the traffic patterns are hidden unless the governments are willing to cooperate. The technical layer and the political layer are separate. Forcing an attacker to obtain a legal warrant is the desired outcome because that forces a measure of accountability. I note that others have expressed skepticism as to my understanding of the political realities. I suggest that their experience in national politics in general and US politics in particular is almost certainly less than mine. These events have cost Microsoft, Google and the other major US providers of cloud services several billion dollars in lost revenues as customers ask if they can trust US companies. Those companies have plenty of political clout to protect their interests. While corporate interests don't always win in the US system, this is an issue where the corporate interest and public opinion are in very strong agreement. For reasons that will not apply to his successor, the current President had particular reason to rely on the intelligence services, specifically the need to wind down two wars that the US had been losing due to the utter incompetence of his predecessor. Whoever wins in 2016 is not going to be facing those same needs but to get elected they will have to answer the questions raised by the civil rights abuses of the intelligence services now that the Snowden documents have made the issues apparent to the population at large. Gen Alexander has been fired, so has Clapper and so have much of their support staffs. Now that was for the political embarrassment that their incompetent tradecraft has caused the politicians but their successors are not going to be engaging in business as usual. I believe that they are going to have little choice but to concentrate on what should be the core mission of the NSA: defending the US and its allies. -- Website: http://hallambaker.com/
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