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PRISM: Here's how the NSA wiretapped the Internet

Summary: The U.S. National Security Agency's PRISM program is able to collect, in realtime, intelligence not limited to social networks and email accounts. But the seven tech companies accused of opening 'back doors' to the spy agency could well be proven innocent.
ZDNet Community
Zack Whittaker
By ZDNet Community and  for Between the Lines |
Editor's note: The following article should be treated as strictly hypothetical. It has been editorialized to simplify the content in certain areas, while maintaining as much technical detail as we can offer. Companies named in this article have been publicly disclosed, or used in example only. This piece should not be taken necessarily as fact but as a working theory that portrays only one possible implementation of the U.S. National Security Agency's PRISM program as it may exist today. Several ZDNet writers contributed to this report.
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The privacy scandal embroiling the Obama administration. (Image: National Security Agency)
Let's start off with what we know, and then we'll explain what we have discovered.
A secret court known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), created under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act 1978 and subsequently amended by the Patriot Act in 2001,forced Verizon to hand over "tangible things" to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA).
The news was first reported by London, U.K.-based newspaper The Guardian.
A day later, another leak pointed to a surveillance program known only as PRISM, which was funded by the NSA. A classified document in form of a PowerPoint deck, designed to train new operatives, was published online. Only four out of 41 slides were published The Washington Post.

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The slides indicated that AOL, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, Google and YouTube, Microsoft and Skype, and little-known company PalTalk were involved in some way. The slides described how these companies were "current providers" but did not explicitly state that these firms knowingly or directly handed over data to the intelligence agency.
The wording on the fourth slide described the "dates when PRISM collection began for each provider," and not, for example, "dates when each provider began PRISM collection."
One by one, nearly all of the named companies denied knowledge of either knowing about PRISM, or providing any government agency user content, data or information without a court order or a search warrant.
But during that time, almost everyone forgot about Verizon. It's the cellular and wireline giant that makes the whole thing come together.
And here's what we think.
Verizon Business was at the heart of a FISC order that invoked Section 215 of the Patriot Act[PDF] which forced the company to hand over any "tangible things," which was effectively anything it had.
Verizon Business Network Services, or simply "Verizon Business," is what is known as a Tier 1 network provider, after it acquired a number of firms during the late-1990s and early 2000s. It offers Tier 1 services under the brand UUNET.
We believe the FISA court order authorized the NSA to place a wiretap device on Verizon Business' Tier 1 network, which effectively vacuumed up every bit and byte of data that flowed through its networks. If this is the case, Verizon would have been forced to comply, with no grounds to appeal.
The key to this is what a Tier 1 network actually does, how it works, and which companies use it. Because all of the aforementioned companies use Tier 1 networks, and as a result they may have unknowingly had their customers' data siphoned off simply by being connected to the Internet.

Tier 1s: The super-fast network arteries that power the Web

The Internet may be distributed and decentralized in nature, but there is a foundation web of connectivity that enables major sites and services to operate. These are referred to as "Tier 1" network providers. Think of these as pipes of the main arteries of the Internet, in simple terms.
The data that flows on them goes directly to the location they are needed, which ultimately allow datacenters to communicate with each other across oceans in the matter of microseconds. Businesses and their datacenters do not miss a beat.
There are only just over a dozen Tier 1 network providers in the world, including AT&T, Level 3, and Sprint in the U.S.; Deutsche Telekom in Germany; NTT Communications in Japan; and Telefonica in Spain, just to name a few major brand names. Verizon Business is, of course, also on that list as a U.S.-based Tier 1 network provider.
These networks allow major businesses, television networks, science labs, and governments, for instance, to share vast amounts of data across the Internet in a very short space of time. This isn't being done on the public Internet, in which data "hops" about different networks looking for the cheapest path. Instead data flowing on Tier 1 networks take the simplest path. 

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Plus, many of the aforementioned companies have datacenters in multiple locations around the world. These need to communicate instantaneously to ensure geo-redundancy, so if one datacenter goes down, the data is stored elsewhere safely.
Edge devices, known as "peers," are entry points of Tier 1 Internet service providers to their enterprise customers.
For example: CBS (which owns ZDNet) is connected to a Tier 1 network via a peering connection so it can broadcast material instantly without delays or hitches. Verizon and AT&T, as examples of home and business Internet providers, are also hooked into the Tier 1 network and offer similar peering connections. 
Companies with peering connections to Tier 1 networks include corporations like AOL, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo, Google and YouTube, Microsoft and Skype. Peering connections to Tier 1 networks not only allow these companies to participate as enterprises to the wider Web with the fastest connection possible, but also to enable users sitting at home on their broadband providers' network to access various services and included content without routing through the public, slower Internet.
Simply put, it's why Facebook and Google load so quickly and function instantly for so many users.
Take Facebook as a good example. Users expect extremely fast response times. As you sit at home browsing the site, at each request your copper telephone wire or fiber connection then links up to your Internet provider's network, which is likely a Tier 2 network, the most common kind of network. That data then travels through a private optical carrier link to Facebook, which will have an edge connection connecting the Tier 1 connection to its network or its datacenter. The data is pulled for the user and sent back over the Tier 1 connection. 
In even simpler terms, Facebook and other companies have created a private connection to your Internet provider at home or work so that these sites can load up almost instantly without using the public Internet at all.

How can the NSA capture this user data? Good ol' fashioned wiretapping

The chances are that the aforementioned companies have indeed had their customers' data intercepted by the NSA. It is almost entirely the case that these companies had no idea about PRISM before it broke in the media, as their respective statements have claimed, or that any data was passed by these companies directly to the NSA or any other intelligence agency. 
The easiest way to acquire this data would be to simply wiretap the data as it's traveling along the Tier 1 optical carrier lines.
How the NSA can do it —>
Topics: Cloud, Government, Government US, Networking, Security
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