[StanislavPetrov]

Couldn't agree more. In addition to that, the NSA (among other government organizations) sniffs and logs all internet (including Twitter) traffic. Given the unlimited resources of the government to sift, sort, and mine this data (thanks to our taxpayer dollars) it wouldn't be at all surprising if they didn't already construct a superior, parallel analytic system unconstrained by any of the regulations or financial restrictions faced by Twitter.

[sp332]

Twitter is TLS by default, so it wouldn't be very useful to just capture the traffic. They'd have to either MITM (which would be detectable e.g. by the SSL Observatory) or by obtaining Twitter's TLS keys for decryption.

[gknoy]

I no longer feel that believing such things to be in the realm of the NSA's capabilities is an indicator of craziness.

[sp332]

Yeah, and now that I think of it, it would probably be easier to hack the other endpoint (the users' computers). I'm just saying, knowing that the NSA has been recording web traffic doesn't automatically mean they have all the tweets.

[awinograd]

This is a ridiculous claim. The government doesn't have the resources to monitor the entirety of the Internet.

[StanislavPetrov]

Where have you been for the last few years? What resources exactly do you think they lack? Why do you think the NSA just built a 1,000,000 square foot data center in Utah?

https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/buildi...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...

[tptacek]

"The NSA just built a 1,000,000 square foot data center in Utah" is not, in fact, a rebuttal to the parent comment.

[winteriscoming]

> https://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/

FWIW - That's a parody site. However, that's not to disclaim that the Utah data center isn't being built.

[Forbo]

It was completed in September of 2014.

[cm2187]

If you take out porn videos and duplicate js libraries the text traffic is probably not that great!

[cmurf]

Right. And also deduct 90+% likely spam/phishing candidates, and all youtube and Netflix streams and what remains is what, 20%? 10%?

[cm2187]

I'd say less than that. Remove all https traffic, js frameworks, identical images, video, newspapers and major blog entries, and I'd guess the remaining text traffic must be 1-2% of the global traffic.

One thing I'd guess too is that the NSA must have the mother of all password databases. Given all the login forms that went through unencrypted and still do. If I was the NSA that's the first thing I would have captured.

[Mtinie]

I guess it is time to start hiding my sensitive data inside of customized versions of jQuery and Angular! :)

[dangerlibrary]

My understanding is that they store all https traffic to be decrypted later.

[cm2187]

That I find harder to believe. A lot of video is going through https, that would be huge amounts.

[grey-area]

oh tempora oh mores

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempora

[xerophyte12932]

Yes, but is it really that absurd to think the govt could monitor all twitter traffic and form a superior analytical tool if it wanted to?

[lowpro]

Only the 98% of web traffic that goes through the US.

Although really the other 2% wouldn't be hard to get considering the power they have.

[cyphar]

NSA has partnership with many other nation states. They get much more data than just the data which goes through the US.

[Forbo]

For anyone wanting more information on this, it is commonly referred to as "Five Eyes": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Eyes

Also of note is the "Future Enlargement" section of that article, where it expands on other partnerships: "Six Eyes", "Nine Eyes", "Fourteen Eyes".