If my piece, please, by all means, elaborate on the inaccuracies. I freely admit that I don’t have an incredible amount of knowledge about backbone operations as I’m more of a software/protocol guy, but I did do several hours of research, and I’m pretty sure my sources were good.

The Wired piece, however, did get a lot of criticism from the community, so if that’s what you’re referring to, I can believe that, though again, I’d love to hear specifics beyond “wrong on a lot of details.”

Don: A former employee of Narus explained that the “Semantic Traffic Analyzerâ€Â? is basically just a Linux or Solaris box that generally just shunts off “interesting” information into an Oracle database. He said that he found the claim that Narus devices could reliably process even a fraction of the data coming through a backbone to be highly dubious despite the fact that they’re supposedly rated for OC-192 in certain circumstances, and suggested that Mark Klein had misidentified the room and that it was actually meant for normal lawful intercept purposes. Since this setup apparently uses an optical splitter, I’m assuming that besides the probable degredation resulting from inserting the splitter into the middle of the fiber, this setup isn’t really going to slow the backbone down, rather it’s just an issue of whether or not it can handle that much information coming through at once.

On the subject of “risk-aversion,” I think that describes the vast majority of American corporate culture. Nothing unusual there at all. In the corporate world, perceived risk has always been treated like the devil. What I’m concerned about is more that fighting a government request would be seen as a “risk.”

While it would not surprise me if AT&T were quite annoyed about the publication of those documents, it would surprise me very much if the content of them pointed to anything which can in any way be described as criminal.

AT&T has a (well-deserved) reputation as a very conservative company compared to other data companies. Their lawyers and policymakers tend to be risk-averse, and that’s why I’d be surprised if anything they did did not have sufficient legal foundation. That doesn’t mean that it’s good PR, and “we read your email” isn’t exactly something which the company would want to put on its promo posters…

Do you really think they’d stop there?

Oh…they haven’t.

The problem is one of security. The way the internet was built did not factor in privacy. That can be both good and bad. Recently, many have been clamoring for building a completely new infrastructure for a more secure, private internet…meaning private for the user to view whatever he or she wishes without others knowing about it. Will it happen? Unlikely.

Of course, this hinges on the idea that AT&T bought only one STA 6400 for NSA use, and installed it in a single room on the west coast to monitor a single trunk.

Do you really think they’d stop there?