It’s been a bit All Snowden, All The Time on this blog. I think it makes sense to read the story as a European one, though. Here’s a little more. From Snowden Part One:
Snowden: As a general rule, so long as you have any choice at all, you should never route through or peer with the UK under any circumstances. Their fibers are radioactive, and even the Queen’s selfies to the pool boy get logged.
This got remarkably little attention in the UK but it ought to have done. The southern UK is an enormous centre of telecoms infrastructure, especially in terms of peering and interconnection. There is just so much hard infrastructure in the ground that it’s not practical for this stuff to leave for some time. But some time only goes for some time. Amsterdam, for example, is already home to AMS-IX, an Internet exchange as big as LINX. Paris doesn’t have a serious IX for some reason, although there is a lot of fibre and that could change.
The real keys to the Internet economy are peering points and data centres. We would be horrified if someone with a global platform was to suggest blacklisting aircraft or ships that call in the UK. We should be similarly concerned about the long term costs of all this interception, especially as it didn’t keep us out of Iraq or provide useful information about Helmand before the Army went in.