NSA: We're Only looking at 1.6% of all Internet Traffic

[c1ue]

http://forums.theregister.co.uk/foru..._the_internet/

The US's National Security Agency (NSA) has issued a document titled The National Security Agency: Missions, Authorities, Oversight and Partnerships (PDF) that explains some of its operations - and includes a claim it “... touches about 1.6 per cent... “ of daily Internet traffic and “...only 0.025 per cent is actually selected for review”.

That doesn't sound so bad right?

Well, that is until you learn that:

1) 51% of US internet traffic is video. People watching Youtube, Netflix and porn

http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2010/...breakdown.html

2) 31% of Internet traffic is bad robots, and 20% is good robots:

http://www.themarysue.com/robots-online-traffic/

Spam, Search engines, etc. Presumably not much overlapping with the above

Allowing for some obvious measurement and rounding errors - it seems like the NSA is basically watching everything else.

Confirmation from graph in 1st reference:



Notice email is a really tiny fraction.

[jk]

Re: NSA: We're Only looking at 1.6% of all Internet Traffic

i'm not sure that they can ignore all the images, given the possibility of steganographic codes.

[c1ue]

Re: NSA: We're Only looking at 1.6% of all Internet Traffic

i'm not sure that they can ignore all the images, given the possibility of steganographic codes.

I'm sure they don't.

However, it doesn't take much exercise to see that a gigantic amount of overall internet traffic can be dismissed immediately without review: corporate web sites, Google/search engine robots, Spam emails, porn, VEVO music videos, pirated movies, etc etc.

The 1.6% number is more than enough to cover all email, all social media, all text/chat messaging, and have plenty left over for other stuff.