Nice how you duck the main issue: That there IS a valid reason for the NSA monitoring information routed through the U.S. without individual warrants.

I'd bet good money that the government of China would pay just such a premium, to ensure that phone traffic involving Chinese citizens could be monitored. Not just for terrorism, either.

How long will it be before people are willing to pay a premium to a telecom company willing to guarantee that its traffic doesn't flow through the United States?

It's an irrelevant question because they already use extensive collection from overhead and they already operate everywhere in the world.

It might be nice to use as a marketing tool, but the reality is, no matter where you are on this planet, you can count on having zero chance of not being able to have the slightest bit of privacy.

And another word for encryption is "charming."

Yeah, the people who control the Hong Kong hub will be far more respectful of privacy.

Countries spy. Period. Any nation will spy on the telecommunications traffic which flows through it, if they have such ability, or someone with the ability is willing to pay them, or to otherwise compensate them, for access.

Did they steal that graphic from the end to the movie War Games?

Mod, have you checked harry's relationship to AH? The MOs are completely the same.

Harry: Don't be a doofus. Nobody in Congress has ever opposed warrantless taps of foreign-to-foreign communications that come through our switches. It's U.S. citizens that we're concerned about. Bush thinks the rules ought to be loose enough to allow warrantless tapping of Americans, and the rest of don't.

Understand?

And another word for encryption is "charming."

Only if you don't do it right. Indeed, encryption is the only way out of this.

*

....Al Gore invented the internet...meathead republican at 1:39 PM

There's something odd about the map. Others (such as this) show a much greater density within Europe, which seems to be treated as a unit, netting out all the intra-European cross-border traffic. It's a pity the map doesn't distinguish between Internet and POTS traffic. My guess would be that the Internet is less dependent than POTS on routing through the USA.

The ITU charging model is important. When I was sent to a preparatory meeting for the World Information Summit I got the impression that a lot of developing countries were much more worried about the loss of income from the shift to the Internet, which reduces income from overcharging for international phone calls, than they were about censoring political sites and pornography.

That there IS a valid reason for the NSA monitoring information routed through the U.S. without individual warrants.

No, there isn't.

If there was a valid reason, there'd be grounds for a warrant. That's what a warrant is.

Kevin: "[T]hanks to international tariff agreements ... it's often cheaper for small countries to route calls through the U.S. than it is to simply send them directly next door"

Well, that's only fair, since most American corporations now route their customer service calls to foreign countries. When I called Hawaiian Airlines three weeks ago to book a flight to Los Angeles, I found myself talking to a very nice man named Rajiv in Mumbai, India.

cmdicely, a warrant is something designed for a specific case and target. Try that for running thousands of calls through a computer.

Harry: Don't be a doofus. Nobody in Congress has ever opposed warrantless taps of foreign-to-foreign communications that come through our switches. It's U.S. citizens that we're concerned about. Bush thinks the rules ought to be loose enough to allow warrantless tapping of Americans, and the rest of don't.

Did you even read the article you linked? Half of it was about the legal problems with this exact form of communication. It's only recently that the Democrats have come around a bit.

Did you even read the article you linked? Half of it was about the legal problems with this exact form of communication. It's only recently that the Democrats have come around a bit.

These "legal problems" are part of a manufactured crisis designed to stampede the Congress into retroactively giving amnesty and immunity to the telcos, which are liable for allowing the government unfettered access to their networks.

When the American people are finally told the truth about what was done to "protect" them from the political enemies of the Republican Party instead of terrorists, what was collected, how much was collected, and how this is easily the single greatest instance of government intrusion into the privacy of the American people, there won't be any question about "legality" or "national security."

No matter what anyone tries to say, if a terrorist is talking about doing harm to this country, their conversations can be collected. It doesn't matter if a FISA court has to issue a warrant, it doesn't matter if this happens on US soil--we have always had the ability to collect what terror suspects say. There is no bogeyman liberal court preventing anyone from doing their job. The FISA court has struck down less than 1 percent of all the warrants that have been submitted to it. You wingers just keep getting it wrong, over and over again, because you can't handle basic facts.

ALL of the communications we need to monitor are taken care of by the laws we had in place BEFORE Bush came into office and BEFORE 9/11. Whenever there is a new technology, the FISA laws were amended without incident. If communications touch on US persons, there is a FISA court in place that protects the privacy rights of that US person. Every single extraneous aspect of the confusion that the Bush Administration has tried to use to its advantage to get more power, and to spy on more people, and to protect people who have broken the law is simply a dishonest lie.

And when you get caught telling a dishonest lie, you deserve what you get. Personally, how much outrage can you have at these people? It's just one more pebble in the pond.

From one of the upper echelon of tellers of "honest" lies:

"And when you get caught telling a dishonest lie, you deserve what you get."

"How long will it be before people are willing to pay a premium to a telecom company willing to guarantee that its traffic doesn't flow through the United States?"

uuh --- approximately never?
Anyone who values security can, right now, use SSL or ssh to establish secure connections. Pretty much no-one bothers to do so.
(And I say this as someone who actually did set up such connections for my own mail server, and who is no great fan of the NSA state.)

If you tells ahn honest lie, you have told a 'True Lie', nicht wahr?

And when you get caught telling a dishonest lie, you deserve what you get.

Sorry, I meant that to be something that is both criminal and wrong; I meant to emphasize that these people have been lying and telling lies about their criminal activities.

What makes you think the Chinese, who filter their citizens' internet, and the Brits, who have surveillance cameras throughout their country, are less likely to monitor calls routed through their country than we are. If anything, they're more likely to monitor calls. The US may end up being the safest place to route calls through. Especially, since the sheer volume makes it easier to "hide in plain sight".