Years back I was touring a local datacenter that was more than a bit quirky, but their offer was basically that they had fiber loops into the main carrier hotel a few blocks away. This was useful because the guy than ran the carrier hotel wouldn't even return your email unless you were from BigCo.
But anyhow, walking around he pointed out one cage and said something like "And that's the NSA's cage, we don't ask what they do haw haw." At the time I mostly thought he was just exaggerating or joking around. But later after revelations of the scale of bulk collection I had to wonder if it really was true and simply banally that much in the open.
So much was revealed in the European Parliament's ECHELON report back in 2000 that I found it hard to understand why Snowden made the big splash that he did. It all seemed pretty old hat to me.
The chattering classes love counter-cultural packaging. That is why they embraced Greta Thunberg much more than they embraced Al Gore despite the messaging being the same.
The ECHELON report revelations were packaged into a formal (boring) European Parliament report. Meanwhile Edward Snowden had the counter-cultural packaging of a cool dissident hacker.
And the Utah data center that stores days worth of the entire Internet and then they just keep the most interesting parts and the parts they can't hack into for later analysis.
Years back I was touring a local datacenter that was more than a bit quirky, but their offer was basically that they had fiber loops into the main carrier hotel a few blocks away. This was useful because the guy than ran the carrier hotel wouldn't even return your email unless you were from BigCo.
But anyhow, walking around he pointed out one cage and said something like "And that's the NSA's cage, we don't ask what they do haw haw." At the time I mostly thought he was just exaggerating or joking around. But later after revelations of the scale of bulk collection I had to wonder if it really was true and simply banally that much in the open.