[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] NSA's Lucky Break

[Bill Totten]

How the US Became Switchboard to the World

by Ryan Singel

Wired (October 10 2007)


A lucky coincidence of economics is responsible for routing much of the
world's internet and telephone traffic through switching points in the
United States, where, under legislation introduced this week, the US
National Security Agency will be free to continue tapping it.

Leading House Democrats introduced the so-called RESTORE Act (.pdf)
Tuesday that allows the nation's spies to maintain permanent
eavesdropping stations inside United States switching centers. Telecom
and internet experts interviewed by Wired News say the bill will give
the NSA legal access to a torrent of foreign phone calls and internet
traffic that travels through American soil on its way someplace else.

But contrary to recent assertions by Bush administration officials, the
proportion of international traffic entering the United States is
dropping, not increasing, experts say.

International phone and internet traffic flows through the United States
largely because of pricing models established more than 100 years ago in
the International Telecommunication Union to handle international phone
calls. Under those ITU tariffs, smaller and developing countries charge
higher fees to accept calls than the US-based carriers do, which can
make it cheaper to route phone calls through the United States than
directly to a neighboring country.

"Carriers shop around for the best price for termination", says Stephan
Beckert, the research director at Telegeography, a
communications-traffic research firm.

The United States, where the internet was invented, was also home to the
first internet backbone. Combine that architectural advantage with the
pricing disparity inherited from the phone networks, and the United
States quickly became the center of cyberspace as the internet gained
international penetration in the 1990s.

In those early days, internet traffic from one Asian country often
bounced through the first West Coast internet-exchange point, the San
Jose-based MAE West, says Bill Woodcock, the research director for
Packet Clearing House, which helps create packet-exchange points around
the world.

While nobody outside the intelligence community knows the exact volume
of international telephone and internet traffic that crosses US borders,
experts agree that it bounces off a handful of key telephone switches
and perhaps a dozen IXPs in coastal cities near undersea fiber-optic
cable landings, particularly Miami, Los Angeles, New York and the San
Francisco Bay Area.

Miami sees most of the internet traffic between South America and the
rest of the world, including traffic passing from one South American
country to another, says Bill Manning, the managing partner of ep.net.
"Basically they backhaul to the United States, do the switch and haul it
back down since (it's) cheaper than crossing their international borders".

And some internet traffic traveling from Asia to Europe still crosses
the entire breadth of the United States, entering in Los Angeles and
exiting in New York, says Woodcock.

For voice traffic, the NSA could scoop up an astounding amount of
telephone calls by simply choosing the right facilities, according to
Beckert, though he says NSA officials "make a big deal out of naming them".

"There are about three or four buildings you need to tap", Beckert says.
"In Los Angeles there is One Wilshire; in New York, Sixty Hudson, and in
Miami, the NAP of the Americas".

The United States' role as an international communications hub came at a
convenient time for the National Security Agency, which in the 1990s
began confronting a world moving away from easily-intercepted microwave
and satellite communications, and toward fiber optics, which are
difficult and expensive to tap.

Press leaks in recent months have revealed that the NSA began tapping
the US communications hubs for purely international traffic shortly
after 9/11, at the same time that it began monitoring communications
between US citizens and foreigners as part of the Terrorist Surveillance
Program.

After the Democrats took over Congress in 2007, the administration put
the NSA surveillance programs under the supervision of a secretive
spying court, which ruled shortly thereafter that wiretapping US-based
facilities without a warrant was illegal, even for the purpose of
harvesting foreign communications.

In August, Congress granted the NSA "emergency" temporary powers to
continue the surveillance, which are set to expire in February. The
RESTORE Act (the Responsible Electronic Surveillance That is Overseen
Reviewed and Effective Act of 2007) is the Democrat's effort to extend
that power indefinitely, while including some safeguards against abuse.
It would legalize both the foreign-to-foreign intercepts, and the
domestic-to-foreign surveillance associated with the Terrorist
Surveillance Program.

The bill enjoys wide support in the House, but on Wednesday President
Bush vowed to veto any surveillance legislation that doesn't extend
retroactive legal immunity to telephone companies who cooperated in the
NSA's domestic surveillance before it was legalized - a provision absent
from the RESTORE Act. AT&T, which is facing a class-action lawsuit for
allegedly wiretapping the internet on behalf of the NSA, is reportedly
among the companies lobbying hard for immunity.

Experts say that, even with a stamp of approval from Congress, the
growth of international communications networks will eventually rob the
NSA of its home-field advantage in inspecting foreign communications.
"The creation of alternative paths are starting to challenge the
dominant position the US has", Manning says, adding that the changes
will not be welcomed by US intelligence services.

Exchanges in Hong Kong and London are emerging as local hubs for Asian
and European traffic, while new fiber cables running north and south
from Japan around to Europe will divert traffic from the trans-America
route. Meanwhile, more countries are building their own internal
internet exchanges.

"Because the decisions are made by the private sector, you're always
going to go the direction where you have the cheapest fiber", Woodcock
says. "That's likely to be through the US for a while yet, (but) that's
changing as more and more fiber gets installed around South Asia".

Manning points to South Africa as an example of how countries are
creating their own internet exchanges.

"In South Africa for a long time, ISPs didn't talk to each other and
would backhaul traffic to the US or Europe", Manning said. "What they
have done in last ten years, they have built local exchange points and
fixed regulatory conditions to allow cross exchange of traffic".

The trend may leave US spooks longing for a simpler time; like 1992,
when the first - and at the time, only - internet exchange point, called
MAE-East, was erected in Washington DC.

"All the traffic in the world went through Washington", Woodcock says.
"But it was coincidence that it was Washington, more or less, and it was
private-sector. And it probably wasn't tapped for at least a couple of
years."

http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/10/domestic_taps/

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