> No, they never made that argument because they don't grab and store all packets. Instead, they stored the metadata extracted from these packets (the sender and receiver). This program has ended prior to Snowden's leaks according to his documents, but the telephone pen register collection was still ongoing.

The utah data center is their buffer. And they were storing large amounts of traffic because they had their diffie-helman hack.

> No, this was public Internet, at places like Room 641A. There was nothing in the leaks suggesting they had spliced private fiber.

I've talked to Google engineers about this. They spliced private fiber. Google was smart enough to encrypt anything routed over public internet, but thought that their private WAN was safe until the disclosures.

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lern_too_spel 2 days ago | parent [-]

> The utah data center is their buffer.

The Utah data center hadn't even been constructed at the time of Snowden's leaks, so obviously there was no evidence for that in the leaks.

> And they were storing large amounts of traffic because they had their diffie-helman hack.

Again, there was no evidence that they were doing this in the leaks. The leaks said that they did full take data collection only in a specific set of regions like Afghanistan.

> I've talked to Google engineers about this. They spliced private fiber.

Those engineers simply misread the leaks. What they did was insert their network analyzers in places like Room 641A, next door to an IX where subsea cables connect to private routers. These cables pass through that room first. No splicing required. If you look at the third slide in the PRISM/US-984XN deck, you can see that this happens only on international infrastructure like these subsea cables, not on purely domestic DC to DC links.

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monocasa 2 days ago | parent [-]

Please, just stop.

The engineers I've talked to did not misread the leaks and found non public information confirming it. The diffie-hellman stuff has explicit evidence in the leaks. Yes, the Utah data center is newer than the leaks. It was created because total traffic was expanding and they required more storage.

	▲	lern_too_spel a day ago \| parent [-]
		> Please, just stop. I will stop correcting you when you stop posting falsehoods. The conspiracy theories that people spread following the Snowden leaks that were contradicted by the leaks themselves helped lead to a the government we have today, so this is not some minor issue that I will let rest. > The diffie-hellman stuff has explicit evidence in the leaks. Nothing in the leaks says they were exploiting a Diffie-Helman weakness. That was hypothesized years after the leaks. I didn't address this because it was irrelevant compared to the larger lie that they "grab and store all packets" in the US instead of in some small set of regions with little Internet traffic and extreme national security interest as said in the leaks. > It was created because total traffic was expanding and they required more storage. Again, not because they were storing full take US data. That is not in the leaks.