They Know Much More Than You Think | James Bamford

Even Bamford doesn’t get all the details. There is a great engineering story to tell around how the NSA gets around physical limits like speed of light, CPU die size or bus bandwidth. I want to know how they do real-time analysis on SPDY encrypted gmail sessions. Numbers like “less than one percent of worldwide Internet bandwidth” does not transit the US just makes no sense without more qualifiers. The speed of light means packets travel relatively slowly at 7.5ms per 1000 miles, and that’s one packet. Heck one packet doesn’t even get you the Cookies header in an HTTP request.