[Infowarrior] - NSA's Lucky Break: How the U.S. Became Switchboard to the World

[Richard Forno]

NSA's Lucky Break: How the U.S. Became Switchboard to the World
By Ryan Singel Email 10.10.07 | 2:00 PM
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/news/2007/10/domestic_taps

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 U.S.
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
amount 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 U.S.-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 U.S. 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
L.A. there is 1 Wilshire; in New York, 60 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
U.S. communications hubs for purely international traffic shortly after
9/11, at the same time that it began monitoring communications between U.S.
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 U.S.-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 U.S.
has," Manning says, adding that the changes will not be welcomed by U.S.
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 U.S. 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 U.S. or Europe," Manning said. "What they have done
in last 10 years, they have built local exchange points and fixed regulatory
conditions to allow cross exchange of traffic."

The trend may leave U.S. 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 D.C.

"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."