You Can't Make This UP!

Back a few years ago I suggested building what I termed a MAE Europe, a hub for European Internet Traffic. Simply stated at the time all Internet traffic went either to MAE East or MAE West in the US and was subject to surveillance by various US entities. By building a MAE East we have a non-US nexus and by putting it in Prague or Vienna we would be at the heart of then then expanding Internet. I actually built a mini version but for a variety of reasons it never got traction.

Now Ars Technica has a fantastic piece showing how US carriers allowed the routing of all traffic through China Telecom, the PRC's home turf! You cannot make this up. Any first year engineering student should know how to use the UNIX command tracent to see where the packets go. It even tells you the carriers and IP addresses as it sends a message. Thus if one sent a message say from Lockheed in San Jose to the CIA in Langley one would see the path. If one did this simple task one would perhaps have seen what is in the article, the packets were circling around in China!

Now the carrier should have been doing this as a matter of common network management, we did! So I guess China does not have to sneak in, we are sending them everything as a matter of course! Now who did they hire to manage the network?