[ih] Where it All Started: Panel Discussion on the Birth of the European Internet [RIPE NCC - South East Europe 12 Meeting in Athens, Greece]

[John Gilmore]

Guy Almes via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> While not super-expensive and certainly well-intentioned, it did have
> definite advantages for the US by maintaining a kind of US-centrism of
> the international Internet topology for several years.  The historical
> consequences of this were not merely economic.

As noted, this was also true in international telephony.

Histories of WW2 written before the disclosure of the Polish,
UK, and US high volume breaking of the German Enigma traffic had
to be significantly revised.  It will be interesting to see how the
history of international telegraphy, telephony, and the Internet will
shift when the relevant history emerges from classified restrictions.

Some sources have claimed that the long-term partnership between AT&T
and NSA was behind the relatively low prices for US-based international
telephone traffic.  It was easy for NSA to wiretap foreign voice
communications that were deliberately routed through the United States
and through its partner AT&T.  Covertly collecting a similar volume of
traffic from a myriad of foreign destinations (and also covertly
bringing it back to the US for processing) would have been much harder
for NSA.

The Center for Seismic Studies was another example, funded to bring
classified Soviet nuclear explosion test monitoring data from Norway to
Northern Virginia, and meanwhile letting anybody in Europe piggyback
free email and netnews traffic on that expensive ...!seismo!mcvax!
undersea leased line.  Again, that cover traffic was trivial to wiretap
at the cable landing where it crossed the US border.  The CSS experience
led directly to the Uunet centralized-uucp mail and netnews service,
which then led to forming the second US commercial ISP, also called
Uunet.  Uunet and its first big customer The Microsoft Network were
instrumental in launching the rapid Internet expansion of the 1990s.

Today, legalized monitoring of billions of worldwide users by offering
them "free" or underpriced services is a business model followed by
Google and Facebook.  NSA could never get aboveboard legal permission to
do the level of intense minute-by-minute population-wide monitoring that
Google does, for example.  But whatever these companies collect and
retain is easy for the spooks to obtain using corrupt laws in the United
States.

	John