Vacuuming the Internet

As part of the NSA surveillance revelations, there have been accusations that many popular consumer internet companies such as Google, Apple and Facebook have allowed the NSA to "directly attach to their servers" and vacuum up all of the data going in and out of these servers.  The management of these companies have vehemently denied giving the NSA unfettered access to their customer's data. This CNET article has a good summary of what has happened so far on this particular aspect of the NSA surveillance.

Network thinkers know that to effectively monitor a network, you don't seek out the edge nodes, you find the central hubs and monitor them — through them you will have access to most of what is flowing through the net. In a hub-and-spoke system the spokes are all dependent on their local hub to route information/data/bits -- in and out.  In the complex networks like the Internet, hubs are connected to other hubs (but not all).  The pattern of connections amongst the hubs determines which hubs are more central to the overall flow of things throughout the network.

Security expert Bruce Schneier writes...

"The primary way the NSA eavesdrops on internet communications is in the network. That's where their capabilities best scale. They have invested in enormous programs to automatically collect and analyze network traffic. Anything that requires them to attack individual endpoint computers is significantly more costly and risky for them, and they will do those things carefully and sparingly."

Below is a network map of the Autonomous Systems [AS] that form the backbone of the internet.  It is easy to find the central hubs in this network.  Load the 20,000+ nodes [each AS is represented by a node] and 48,000+ links [a data flow between two ASes is represented by a link] into a social network analysis software program and have it run the Betweenness or Connector metric.  These two network metrics reveal how central any node is in keeping everything interconnected.  The hubs will be reveled by the network metrics.  In the diagram below the hubs are sized by their Connector score -- the higher the score, the larger the node, and the more network paths flow through this node.  The colors are randomly assigned and have no meaning.

Most of the large Internet hubs are located in North America. 

The largest hubs [AS] are mostly telecomm companies, internet infrastructure providers, and organizations of the US government.  Most of the large Internet hubs are located in North America.  You can get a pretty good picture of what is flowing through the whole internet by monitoring just a dozen or two of the largest hubs.  An example of how these main hubs can be tapped, and utilized, is told in the story of Room 641a of SBC Communications in San Francisco.

Whether the NSA has a direct tap into your favorite social network, or search engine, we may never know.  Maybe they don't need the direct connect to capture all of the information flowing on the Net?  

How will the rest of the world view their dependence on the internet, with the U.S.A owning and monitoring the key hubs (key intersections of information flow) in the Net?