Hacking Data Pipes Not That Bad
573 words.
When all those stories were floating around about our government having direct access to Google and Facebook and whatnot, I dismissed them as impossible. The best the government (or anyone else) could do, I thought, was tap into the lines going into and out of Google and Facebook and whatnot. Well guess what?
http://www.foxnews.com/tech/2013/10/30/google-yahoo-hacked-by-us-government/
The National Security Agency has broken into the highly secure data centers where Google and Yahoo store vast troves of data on their users by hacking an unencrypted weak point in the data pipeline linking the enormous centers…
Boldface added by me, because the first part of that sentence is completely stupid. I hate to crow when I’m right, but can you still hear me over the deafening sound of my own awesomeness?
They’re tapping into the fiber optic cable,” Sutton said. “This is raw stuff in proprietary data format, so they had to have a system in place tor translate that to human readable format.”
Nobody hacked into or used back doors into anyone’s servers. They tapped into the raw data stream between the servers, and probably just saved everything on a big hard drive without having a clue what they got. It’s like when you print to a file (if you can even still do that). If you open up the file and look at it, it’s just a bunch of gibberish. You have to study it for a while to find out it’s a series of printer commands which form a picture, and then figure out how to reverse engineer the picture. Now imagine somebody at the NSA walks into an office and puts a big stack of paper with printer commands onto someone else’s desk. How long would it take to sort through them and figure out what all the pictures were? At the speed which the Internet operates, that person would have to decrypt millions of these stacks of paper every second. (Note: I know it’s a bad analogy, but I like the imagery of stacks of paper sitting in someone’s inbox.) That’s why I don’t worry about my own privacy too much with these kinds of stories. The NSA simply can’t have enough resources to reverse engineer all that data, and even if they did, the odds of them looking at my traffic is probably about the same as the odds of getting hit by a meteorite. It’d be like looking for a single drop within the torrent of water coming out of a fire hose. (Aren’t I full of analogies today.)
That’s not to say I don’t care that the NSA is trying to save a copy of all the traffic in the Internet. I think it’s super shady and they should stop, or at the very least, it should not be allowed as evidence unless they have a warrant for a specific crime. But I can’t say that I’m terribly surprised about it. I feel like governments have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to the Internet, both in terms of making laws and maintaining order. For example, there’s probably no law against saving bytes of data from data pipes, which might be why the NSA thought it was okay. So this would probably be a great time for some enterprising young Congressmen to introduce some pragmatic laws about this stuff.
Ha, I’m just joking with you. As if Congress would actually do anything about real issues.
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