Reply #127: There are far too many access points for our all-seeing masters... [View All]

[Orsino]

...to be truly all-seeing. I don't doubt that they're all up in the Tier 1 providers domestically, and internationally where they can get away with it, but the Internet simply isn't sufficiently hierarchical to make this practical. They can choose from among a lot of traffic if they feel like monitoring, but their work is going to rely heavily on tips from other intelligence sources.

And they may be archiving a helluva lot more traffic, but they aren't backing up the Internet every second. That kind of storage doesn't exist, and by the time it does, the Internet itself will also have grown exponentially.

I'll say again that they can see almost anything domestically, given time to set up and inclination, and they can sniff quite a bit of traffic more proactively, but they can't see everything, and they can't store much of it. I don't say these things to minimize the evil that is government spying, but only to underscore that these are people doing the spying: a limited number of people, with technology that sounds awesome but is still inadequate for looking into all traffic.