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

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 16-Jun-24 07:24, John Gilmore wrote:
> 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.

I don't know about that, but of course it's well known that the routing
of many international cable routes through the UK was of great intelligence
value to the British during World War I. It's certain that NSA was aware
of that history.

But on the other hand, 5 Eyes was well established (known as UKUSA)
from the very beginning of the NSA, and the benefits of off-shore
intercepts beyond the reach of domestic legal restrictions were well
understood. So they definitely did that too.

    Brian

> 
> 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