
The Internet Doesn’t Route Around Surveillance - edward
https://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-internet-doesnt-route-around-surveillance
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Animats
Re: “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” That
comment was originally made about USENET, in the "alt.humor.funny" episode at
Stanford in the early 1980s. Due to some political correctness issue, the
newsgroup "alt.humor.funny" was blocked at Stanford's main USENET gateway.

USENET is an eventually-consistent database system. When USENET nodes connect,
each has a list of groups it knows about. For each group a node knows, it
tells the other end what item sequence numbers it has. The node being asked
then provides any items the asking node doesn't have.

This really does route around censorship. Almost all the USENET traffic went
through the main Stanford USENET gateway, but a few machines on campus made
occasional USENET connections to outside machines. That was all it took to
keep the Stanford USENET machines in sync with the outside world. Anything
deleted at the main gateway was filled in over other links.

That's where the line came from. From the days when we really had distributed
networking.

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schoen
A subtlety is that more effective censorship _was_ possible in USENET: by
forging corrupted or redacted versions of particular posts, or, to an extent,
with cancelbots. (The second is potentially less effective because people
could configure systems to ignore cancel messages, but the former could work
really well because USENET never had a content-integrity mechanism, so you
could certainly convince nodes that they already had an article and hence
didn't need to retrieve it again.)

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schoen
It is also possible that a country can spy on traffic that isn't routed
through that country's territory. Three things we've heard about in the last
few years have been bilateral deals between spy agencies to share intercepted
data, compromise of routers, and installation of clandestine physical taps,
whether on land or undersea. There might be good political remedies for some
of these things, but at the technical level it seems like Joseph Hall's view
(from the article) is exactly right.

Edit: there were also reports about different kinds of routing manipulation,
such as BGP attacks, inducing ISPs to deliberately choose surveillable routes
in some cases, or inducing link outages.

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naveen99
Wouldn't it make more sense for surveillance to route around privacy ?

~~~
rhizome
It doesn't have to (or said another way: it does by default), because its
routes are build with laws. However, you could also say that things like the
UK surveillance-kickback agreements are a form of routing around the law, and
I would agree.

