US Security Paranoia over Undersea Cables unexpectedly reveals extent of US surveillance

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/26/world/europe/russian-presence-near-undersea-cables-concerns-us.html?_r=0

Why is US /NATO so concerned about the undersea cables for internet?  Because they “carry more than 95 percent of daily communications”??!

How can they “carry more than 95 percent of daily communications” on the internet??!!  Considering most users and most popular websites are based in US?

It would be an interesting admission, only if most of the daily internet traffic of US is being channeled elsewhere.

Oddly enough, that confirmed what Edward Snowden had revealed, that US government has ordered most ISP’s to redirect traffic to outside US for the purpose of electronic surveillance of internet traffic.

A while back, Snowden revealed a scheme used by US and NATO, wherein the ISP’s redirected internet traffic intentionally around the “Long way” around the world’s internet cables.

How does that work?  Well, all internet traffic are directed by ISP’s and forwarded toward destinations, but the traffic doesn’t always take the same route each time.  The internet traffic directing is done almost entirely based upon the discretion of the ISP’s on the “backbone”.

One can sometimes trick the ISP’s to redirect traffic, by expanding one’s net bandwidth.  This kinda turns one’s node into a “backbone”, which causes more traffic to come through.

On the other hand, having undersea cables carry more than 95% of net traffic would be a neat trick that takes more than just expanding bandwidth.  This requires government orders and coordination.

But why?

Then, there was this:  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2013/11/04/how-we-know-the-nsa-had-access-to-internal-google-and-yahoo-cloud-data/

Apparently, in redirecting internet traffic, US and British intelligence services have tapped into and reverse engineered many private cloud data centers of Google and Yahoo.

This is a lot scarier than just some hacking.

US effectively managed to break down all security behind Google’s cloud data, and allows US to get data from Google without any need for warrants.

Now you see why US is so worried that the Russians might actually sever their data line.