I was reading an article last week, saying that a UK spy agency has accessed the fiber optic cables that carry phone and internet data, and are siphoning directly from them:
It also state that they are sharing what they collect with the NSA. My question is this:
To what degree, if any, would a VPN protect the privacy and/or anonymity of anyone whose traffic was traveling through those cables?
privacy pretty much yes. Anonymity not much
It will be captured and stored until they can break the encryption because that’s how they roll.
The data is picked up. There is no stopping that.
What you can stop is how usable the data is.
What they are doing now is storing Exabytes upon Exabytes of encrypted data and storing it all in massive archives. The “low hanging fruit” is decrypted and analyzed. The highly encrypted data is stored until such a time when it can be trivially decrypted, OR they utilize massive resources to decrypt particular data streams of interest when they come along.
There is another issue with VPNs though. The data from the VPN server to the rest of the internet is not encrypted. So anything intercepted AFTER the VPN server can be captured and analysed normally, but it is partially anonymous, at least depending on how busy the traffic from the VPN server is, and how closely they are watching you in particular.
Long story short: get a VPN with good encryption if you are really concerned about the content of your packets.
A vpn is encrypted end to end, it is scrambled before it leaves your computer, and only unscrambled once it reaches the VPN provider. Assuming uncompromised keys, which is reasonable if you aren’t an idiot with your vpn, the best that people watching it would be able to do is tell you are using a vpn and which vpn provider you are using.
traffic analysis is quite common way of inferring what a person is doing… from this they can determine if additional resources need to be wasted on this ip.
they will find out that they had to store peta-bytes worth of encrypted Call of Duty, Game of Thrones and porn
From what I understand they are not storing so much as processing. They could be looking for patterns in the data (this can be done even from VPN traffic as I understand it.) or patterns from specific users down the line (Storing what kind of traffic, ass oppose to all of the data from the traffic, is still useful to look back on.)
In the end no matter what the case, if you are using your VPN or other systems corrects, you should be at much less risk than others. Be it from government spying or malicious attacks from individuals.
There is a lot that can be assumed based solely on the amount of traffic coming from your computer. They might not be able to see exactly what you are doing, but if someone wanted to watch your internet traffic, they could tell roughly what you are doing, and when.
I can see the NSA now. “WE FINALLY BROKE THE ENCRYPTION!” “What were they hiding?” “Part of episode 7, season 1 of Adventure Time” “BLAST, Those sneaky terrorists! To the next packet!”