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Note that such capture would be quite terrible for performance, not only requiring disabling any hardware offload (a great router might be able to route a few hundred megabit in large packets without offload assuming it doesn't do anything else) to make packets visible for capture, but it would also have to stream the output back to the adversary over the uplink as you would be limited to at most a few gigabytes of local, extremely slow storage, giving no means for local offline analysis...

The risk of access to the router is more that they can access your network and touch unprotected and vulnerable things rather than active monitoring.






And most of that wouldn’t be useful. We use encryption for almost everything now for a reason.

No, wiretaps on modern networks do not rely on backdoors, or even big labeled front doors like SSH, on individual subscriber devices. Instead it is built into the lower level routing. When an ISP gets a warrant (or whatever relevant document your country uses) they configure their routers to tag all of your traffic and mirror it to a server to be recorded. It’s entirely invisible to the subscriber, and highly automated.


> And most of that wouldn’t be useful. We use encryption for almost everything now for a reason.

The topic at hand is local network access. Some examples of things happening on your local network that you might not want Elon/ISP to see:

- Many people have public shares on their NAS for things like media or family photos

- Security cameras

- Printers

- If you're casting, the title of everything you watch is broadcasted on the network

- Even if you're not casting, if you use an Android TV then the title of everything you watch is also broadcasted to the network by default

- The list of all your devices

- If you torrent things, then the hash of all your torrents is likely broadcasted to your local network (through Local Peer Discovery)




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