Thread: Is the US Capable of Monitoring the Internet?

Many assume that the US government is able to read anything and everything passing over telephone, and the internet. However when one truly thinks about this idea, questions of its feasibility arise. The purpose of this article is to brainstorm the feasibility of a system capable of intercepting information from the internet.

First lets look at what the interent really is, since even most techy people to do not understand it. The internet is the interconnection of many smaller privately owned networks, thus no-one owns the interenet, and therefore no single person controls it. (not even the US government). In fact when you use a router to share your internet connection amongst a few family computers, your home network becomes a part of the internet.

Further the internet is based on packet switching technology, which means that information is divided up into discrete packets and sent out to find their own way to their destination. There is no gurantee that all of these packets will take the same path, arrive in order, or even arrive at all. Further these packets may even be broken up into smaller packets en-route to their detination.

The route a packet takes to reach its destiantion cannot be predicted, and there is no central point that all data must pass through. Thus a system capable of recording any information sent over the internet must be able to intercept data at each and ever router on the internet. Alternatively a system could be setup where each and every router sends a copy of each packet to the spy system.

On the scale of the internet, it is not physically possible to have a device at each router, due to both financial and physical restrictions. However theoretically it is possible for the firmware of a router to be modified such that copies of packets sent are also sent to a data collection system. However this method has several obstacles which would have to be overcome.

First, such as system would result in a doubling of bandwidth requirements, as two copies of each packet are being sent, the financial impact of such a system would be astronomical. Secondly, because the internet is made of many privately owned networks, each controlling their own routers, and existing under the jurisdiction of many different governments. It is impossible to enforce a law that requires each router to send copies of its data, without global regulation.

The final hurdle to a system capable of intercepting all data on the internet, is from an unexpected direction. The open-source movement has a strong foothold on the internet. Most web sites run off the open-source apache web browser for example. The essence of open-source is the ability to see exactly what the software is doing. Thus there is no way to covertly cause an open-source routing program to send copies of its data to the US government.

However if we are only interested in the data sent/recieved by a specific node (computer), data-mining does become a possibility. This was demonstrated by the FBI's use of the carnivore system, which was essentially a packet sniffer placed in between a person's ISP and their computer. Yet Carnivore does not provide the FBI with the capaibilities many beleive they have. It cannot monitor all traffic searching for phrases such as "bomb" or "terrorist". In fact the processing requriements of such a system would be so great, that a supercomputer would be needed at even the smallest of ISPs.

Thus we can only conclude that as the internet exists today, it is impossible for a single entity to intercept all data cent over the internet. The internet's laissez-faire organization does in fact work in our favour as far as privacy is concerned. Whilst this article is not an exhaustive look on the subject, it does provide a good insght into the technical difficulties a data interception system would have to overcome. And shows that in order to accomplish this feat, an entity would be required to regulate IP techonology in each and ever corner of the globe, or have the authority/capability to install data miners at each and every router on the internet. Both of which are not possible in our current political state.

Originally posted by justin@Jul 19 2005, 08:08 AM
That's pretty well done, although one thing to consider is that monitoring does not have to occur real-time...the implication being that while the information you send may not be scanned for words like "bomb" or "infidels," if you come under investigation for terrorist activity, it seems likely that the US government could gain access to that information via your ISP's e-mail servers, etc.

Ultimately, the question of privacy on the internet extends beyond efforts to monitor internet activity.

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Thats true, however unless they are quick say within a few hours (sometimes even seconds) the information could be lost. Caches take up lots of space on a server, and generally only popular things are cached there, thus an email is not likely to reside on your ISPs server for very long.

However as I discussed in the article, it is possible for the US government to target a specific individual and record his/her activities from that point on. But again this is only feasible with U.S. citizens (unless they strike a deal with another country). The FBI for example does not have the jurisdiction to setup a carnivore box in a Canadian ISP.