About the NSA: Its all about data. EVERYTHING is now reduced to ones and zeros. The letters you type in your SMS, Twitter, Facebook, and emails are coded as UNICODE. Capital A is decimal 65 and capital letter Z is decimal 90. Lower case a is 97 and lower case z is 122. Unicode allows for more than 65,000 characters which allows it to contain all human alphabets (scripts). The binary code for decimal 65 is 0000 0000 0100 0001. That is how it would be stored or transmitted. Your audio and video are converted to various digital formats: MP3, MP4, AAC, WAV, MP2, AVI, WMA, WMV, FLV, etc. If you look at these files, you will see patterns of ones and zeros. The point here is that all data looks the same at the most basic level. When transmitted this data is streamed and broken into small packets of data and sent on their way using TCP/IP (mostly) and ATM for phone calls. I oun the old days, when you called, a physical connection was made between sender and recipient. If you wanted to listen in, you would need some sort of physical connection to the line. This was known as wiretapping and was supposedly governed by the courts. Nowadays, all data is broken into packets which have a TO and FROM address. This would be as if you sent multiple envelopes to someone (e.g. 1 envelope per page). The recipient collects all the envelopes and reassembles the pages into 1 letter. The data packets are dumped into a flowing stream of other packets. Internet routers direct each packet toward its destination. In TCP/IP packets can take any route to their destination. This was by design to cope with breakdowns in the connection. When all the packets are received at the destination, they are reassembled in order and presented to the recipient. Sounds complicated, but …. your streaming music and videos are delivered this way fast enough so you can watch/listen. Whats the point here for NSA, GCHQ, et al? You are looking at gushing pipes filled with DATA which is coming from EVERYWHERE and going to EVERYWHERE. What are they doing? Evidently, they are just filling up large data farms with all this DATA. Once they have the DATA they can use software to break out (1) phone calls, (2) address books, (3) emails, (4) text messages, etc. There is probably NO WAY to filter out domestic information until they start digging into the database. In the Internet TCP/IP system it is not necessary to tap into any specific line. Since packets can and do go anywhere you could probably introduce an ROUTING PROTOCOL into the routers that would pass a copy of all data through your system where you could capture it. Why do they have those splitters at major telephone companies? Because the telcos use a circuit oriented connection system, it works much like the old line switch system. In order to intercept a packet here one needs to be ín the circuit. The main thing to remember here is that your DATA is traveling along the pipe with a packet from some guy in Al Qaeda or some other guy at the FSB. The political question is: Do you trust the guys at NSA, GCHQ, CNBRC, etc. not to stick their noses into YOUR business? While youre thinking about that, remember that the system administrator who has access to your data is probably some nerdy geek who cant find a girlfriend.
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 00:59:43 +0000
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