NSA does not cope with traffic volumes

Thanks to documents from Edward Snowden, the US National Security Agency (NSA) programs on total Internet traffic tapping, including the MUSCULAR program for capturing traffic between Google and Yahoo data centers around the world directly via fiber optic cables, became known.

As it turned out now, the NSA is not coping with handling too large amounts of traffic that goes into its system, and in 2013 the agency asked to reduce the scope of surveillance under the MUSCULAR program.

"Their current activities reduce the performance of the system when they process all this data," said William Binney, a software developer who uses the NSA, in an interview with the WSJ. According to him, the NSA is mired in an array of unnecessary information that prevents the agency from carrying out useful work to find potential terrorists.


William Binnie
')
It is not surprising that some experts express the view that total surveillance of citizens, including the collection of all metadata and analysis of Internet traffic, did not help prevent a single terrorist act .

William Binnie is virtually unknown to the public, unlike Edward Snowden. Nevertheless, he worked in the NSA for more than 30 years and his current testimony is no less weighty than the documents published by Snowden.

One way or another, the NSA solves the problem in its own way. They believe that in order to handle the increasing volumes of traffic, it is necessary to increase the computing power and build new data centers. For example, now in Utah construction of a giant NSA data center is ending. But this is unlikely to be able to solve the problem, because the traffic on the Internet is growing too fast. Documents published by Edward Snowden, dated 2012, also indicate that NSA representatives complain that the collection of metadata from foreign mobile phones "exceeds our ability to handle and store it."

As William Binnie said, in response to complaints about the lack of technical means for processing data, the NSA was instructed to reduce the amount of surveillance, not to collect information about all citizens, and concentrate on spying on those who "could pose a threat to the state and its allies." The Agency was recommended to develop software for more “intelligent” filtering of collected metadata.

Edward Snowden and many human rights activists said that the NSA collects too much information, most of which is not needed. It turns out that this view is supported by technical limitations in the NSA itself.