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by dehrmann 2257 days ago
Serious hypothetical question: suppose you're able to capture all Zoom calls. If you're a foreign government, how do you scale the analysis, and what can you generally do with the information?

It'd be hard to get a useful amount of trade secrets or know-how. You'll see partial schematics and design docs, but without much context. At the executive level, you could at least scale the analysis to have actual people monitoring the calls. You could get broad strategy (e.g. launch a mid-range 5G phone in 2021 Q1) and enough financial information to make some well-informed trades.
2 comments
cyphar 2257 days ago
The NSA figured this out in the 90s -- you filter based on metadata and then retrieve the corresponding data if necessary. Aside from the fact that this (in the NSA's view) allows them to sidestep the 4th amendment, it's usually much more effective than sifting through billions of records every day. That same system lives on today with XKeyScore (or whatever they've replaced it with in the past 7 years).
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catalogia 2257 days ago
Hard drives are pretty cheap, particularly for a government. Store it all now, target your analysis narrowly later at your leisure.
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sprinfo 2257 days ago
Do you know how much data that would have to be? Scaling that seems improbable.
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cyphar 2257 days ago
The NSA has built a data center in Utah specifically for this problem[1], so it's hardly beyond the realm of plausibility.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

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dehrmann 2257 days ago
Year-old data isn't worth very much.
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catalogia 2257 days ago
There's no reason to think they'd have to wait a year. High value targets, like SpaceX had they not banned the use of Zoom, would obviously receive priority treatment by the Chinese intelligence community. My point here is that the analysis doesn't need to be done in real time, they could store the data and review it a few hours later, or whenever they wanted.

(For that matter, there is certainly a lot of data that would be useful a year later. Some data could be valuable even many years later. Taking SpaceX as an example, it should be obvious that old data could be valuable.)

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