Comment by Henchman21

6 days ago

No. That isn't required at all. Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

> Fundamentally you lack understanding of how this happens. Yes, there is some port duplication. Yes it costs money. But it is not anywhere near as onerous as you assume

No, I understand networking hardware quite well actually. I'm also familiar with Room 641A. Room 641A did not capture 80% of internet traffic. If you think 80% of internet traffic could be routed through Room 641A you're not thinking about the infrastructure required to get it all there. It was a targeted operation on backbone lines that were right there.

  • While the most well known, there are other points of presence doing the same thing. Easy and trivial to duplicate traffic at line speed. It doesn't affect the traffic flow itself.

    • Yes you can trivially tap a fibre -- https://www.gigamon.com/products/access-traffic/network-taps... for example

      You can even do this without breaking the fibre

      What you can't do is ship 80% of the traffic across the world to the US without either the ISPs agreeing, and thus a conspiracy of thousands of people in thousands of ISPs, or doing it outside the data centres, meaning millions of taps in various ducts around the globe, which would be found on a daily basis.