Anyone who has taken a network security class knows that the first rule of Internet security is that there is no Internet security. Indeed, this assumption is baked into the design of the Internet and most packet-switched networks — systems where unknown third parties are responsible for handling and routing your data. There is no way to ensure that your packets will be routed as you want them, and there’s absolutely no way to ensure that they won’t be looked at.

Indeed, the implications of this were obvious as far back as ARPANET. If you connect from point A to point B, it was well known that your packets would traverse untrusted machines C, D and E in between. In the 1970s the only thing preserving the privacy of your data was a gentleman’s agreement not to peek. If that wasn’t good enough, the network engineers argued, you had to provide your own security between the endpoints themselves.

My take from the NSA revelations is that even though this point was ‘obvious’ and well-known, we’ve always felt it more intellectually than in our hearts. Even knowing the worst was possible, we still chose to believe that direct peering connections and leased lines from reputable providers like AT&T would make us safe. If nothing else, the NSA leaks have convincingly refuted this assumption.

The most surprising lesson of the NSA stories is that 20 years after the development of SSL encryption, we’re still sending vast amounts of valuable data in the clear.

Even as late as 2014, highly vulnerable client-to-server connections for services like Yahoo Mail were routinely transmitted in cleartext — meaning that they weren’t just vulnerable to the NSA, but also to everyone on your local wireless network. And web-based connections were the good news. Even if you carefully checked your browser connections for HTTPS usage, proprietary extensions and mobile services would happily transmit data such as your contact list in the clear. If you noticed and shut down all of these weaknesses, it still wasn’t enough — tech companies would naively transmit the same data through vulnerable, unencrypted inter-datacenter connections where the NSA could scoop them up yet again.

There is a view in our community that we’re doing much better now, and to some extent we may be. But I’m less optimistic. From an attacker’s point of view, the question is not how much we’re encrypting, but rather, which valuable scraps we’re not protecting. As long as we tolerate the existence of unencrypted protocols and services, the answer is still: way too much.

It’s the metadata, stupid

Even if we, by some miracle, manage to achieve 100% encryption of communications content, we still haven’t solved the whole problem. Unfortunately, today’s protocols still leak a vast amount of useful information via session metadata. And we have no good strategy on the table to defend against it.

Examples of metadata leaked by today’s protocols include protocol type, port number, and routing information such as source and destination addresses. It also includes traffic characteristics, session duration, and total communications bandwidth. Traffic analysis remains a particular problem: even knowing the size of the files requested by a TLS-protected browser connection can leak a vast amount of information about the user’s browsing habits.

Absolutely none of this is news to security engineers. The problem is that there’s so little we can do about it. Anonymity networks like Tor protect the identity of endpoints in a connection, but they do so at a huge cost in additional bandwidth and latency — and they offer only limited protection in the face of a motivated global adversary. IPSec tunnels only kick the can to a different set of trusted components that themselves can be subverted.

‘Full take’ culture

If we restrict our attention purely to the collection of such data — rather than how it’s accessed — it appears that the limiting factors are almost exclusively technical in nature. In other words, the amount of data collected is simply a function of processing power, bandwidth and storage. And this is bad news for our future.

That’s because while meaningful human communication bandwidth (emails, texts, Facebook posts, Snapchats) continues to increase substantially, storage and processing power increase faster. With some filtration, and no ubiquitous encryption, ‘full take’ is increasingly going to be the rule rather than the exception.

Even if you’re not inclined to view the NSA as an adversary — and contrary to public perception, that view is not uniform even inside Silicon Valley — America is hardly the only intelligence agency capable of subverting the global communications network. Nations like China are increasingly gaining market share in telecommunications equipment and services, especially in developing parts of the world such as Africa and the Middle East.

While it’s cheap to hold China out as some sort of boogeyman, it’s significant that someday a large portion of the world’s traffic will flow through networks controlled by governments that are, at least to some extent, hostile to the core values of Western democracies.

If you believe that this is the future, then the answer certainly won’t involve legislation or politics. The NSA won’t protect us through cyber-retaliation or whatever plan is on the table today. If you’re concerned about the future, then the answer is to finally, truly believe our propaganda about network trust. We need to learn to build systems today that can survive such an environment. Failing that, we need to adjust to a very different world.