[liberationtech] diseconomies of scale

[The Doctor]

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On 06/14/2013 03:24 PM, Lucas Gonze wrote:
> It occurs to me that Prism exclusively targets large providers.
> This suggests that it relies on economies of scale. Which suggests
> a defense against Prism: use small providers, because there are
> diseconomies of scale.

There is a problem with that: Traffic to and from small providers has
to traverse the networks of the tier-II and tier-I providers to go any
appreciable distance.  We already know that at least some of the
peering points are backdoored - Naurus hardware, if I recall
correctly.  So, even if someone sets up a status.net instance that,
let's say for example a subset of this mailing list starts using
instead of Twitter because it's smaller, all of that traffic is still
probably going to pass through a location that's snaffling copies of
every packet.  It might not see every bit of traffic to and from that
site, but enough traffic might be picked up to get an idea of what's
happening there and whether or not a closer look is warranted.

- -- 
The Doctor [412/724/301/703] [ZS]
Developer, Project Byzantium: http://project-byzantium.org/

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