Spies would need superpowers to tap undersea cables The Register has found itself subject to a certain amount of criticism for this author's scepticism regarding whether the NSA has been snooping on optical fibre cables by cutting them. Glenn Greenwald's recent “NSA cut New Zealand's cables” story is illustrative of credibility problems that surround the ongoing Edward Snowden …
Splicing fibres would be far to easy to detect. What you do instead is bend the fibre to tap it. Or you can just tap a splice... which is probably much less protected. You could probably even do it on a well monitored cable if you do it slowly enough. It's probably much simpler than splicing, too.
So yes, there would probably be a lot more easy ways to get to the data, but tapping undersea cables isn't infeasible, the technology has been done for cable on land, and undersea copper connections have been eavesdropped on before.
What's to prevent the USS Jimmy Carter from opening a hatch, lowering a 500m cable, dragging it around a bit (precisely as the cable repair ships do) until they snag the cable, then winch it up (precisely as the cable repair ships do) into the Top Secret cable tapping room, etc? I realize that this proposal would require the addition of a 500m cable and winch to the USS Jimmy Carter, and that might be technically extremely difficult.... ((Rolls-Eyes.))
I suppose that one might argue that it would be equally impossible to fetch a sunk Russian submarine from the bottom of the sea too. In that case, one might be about half-right.
Yes. Plus there is no service interruption if the cable is bent.
The USS Jimmy Carter deploys ROVs to find and expose the cable. Then they lower a shirt-sleeve-environment tapping room on a wire to the tapping point (why would they need to tap the cables inside the submarine?), and Vodaphone / Verizon / whoever subcontracters do the actual bending and tapping.
Best place to bend-tap is just after a repeater where the signal is strong and the bend-tap is least likely to be noticed. Best repeater is probably the first in the chain, which will be nearer land collection points and at lower depth.
Looking at a map of cables, two interesting places for GCHQ/NSA to tap cables - cables run by furruiners whose traffic they might want to look at, and which could not be tapped by a UK/US legal requirement - are in the Eastern Med and the Gulf. They would want some sort of land stations, like the GCHQ outstations at Seeb in Oman and Ayios Nikolaos in Cyprus, nearby to make backhaul easier.
As for NSA, their interests might also include Fortaleza in North Brazil, the British Virgin Islands and a couple of locations in the China sea and Sea of Japan. I imagine BVI would not be a problem, I do not know whether they have anywhere suitable for the other locations.
But they might use buoys for backhaul instead - a highly-directional high-capacity laser transmitter from a buoy which is raised say once per pass to a satellite could be made almost impossible to spot. The part which gets raised above the surface might not need to be more than an inch or so in diameter.
The USS Jimmy Carter then changes the very large batteries left on or buried under the seabed every ten years or so.
If I may quote Robert Morris, former Chief Scientist at NSA: "Never underestimate the attention, risk, money and time that an opponent will put into reading traffic." I think the author of the article is guilty of that.
I was going to say the same. You can easily side tap a fibre. To maximize SnR, it's best to do it really close to the source if possible. A simple machine which consists of a small scale industrial ceramic shielded hole saw surrounded by a silicone sealed rubber boot can easily penetrate the shielding of the fibers and allow insertion of a tap. I don't think it would cost me more than $50,000 in development to build a deep sea robot for tapping 208 fibres with minimal loss and zero downtime. With $200,000, I could probably manage multi-wavelength as well.
Another method is the teeny drop of hydrofluoric acid (HF). This needs to be automated to be hard-to-detect.
You remove the cover of the fiber, then cover it with wax, leaving a teeny hole on one side. You set up the HF-resistant optical tap pointing at the hole, then immerse it and the cable in hydrofluoric acid, which eats the outer layer of the fiber away, all the while monitoring the light which escapes from the fiber. When you get just enough light so you can read the traffic, you neutralise the hydrofluoric acid.
( The eventual clear plastic replacement for the HF liquid needs to have the same refractive index as the HF - but it is easy to change the RI of the HF )
This had the advantage over bending that the tapped light comes from a teeny source, making it more efficient and thus harder to spot. Also, you don't need to create enough slack to bend, which can be a problem in underwater cables.
What you do instead is bend the fibre to tap it.
That's probably not going to be sufficient to get usable data out; you'd likely have to shave off the cladding.
This is not impossible - it's part of the construction of a WDM - but it's bloody difficult in a live system.
For my money, an undersea tap is unlikely - it's so much easier to tap at the shore. But that doesn't make it an impossibility.
Vic.
"What you do instead is bend the fibre to tap it."
" you'd likely have to shave off the cladding.
This is not impossible"
Am I the only one who read the article and/or has seen the inside of deep ocean cable before?
Aside from the fact that those heavily armoured, extremely thick, multi-layered cables of fibre, poly and steel will have a limited amount of bend in them (which may not be sufficient bend for this type of tap) you're still having to cut through the high voltage electrical feed to get to fibre pairs where you've bent it.
Assuming that there's redundancy in those electrical cables and cutting them at one side for your splice doesn't take out one or more repeaters you've still got the danger and inherent problems in cutting through a live high voltage cable, whether that be a diver under the water or inside a hypothetical winch equipped submarine.
... is the enormous cost. You could hide all sorts of dodgy expenses in a budget like that.
The power supply is really easy to deal with. Send a fishing boat out to drop a sharpened anchor on one side of the cable and sail to the other side. You then have plenty of time to install your tap while the cable's owner dispatches a repair ship.
... simply because the author of the article can't think of a way it could have been done.
Just because you can't figure out how it was done, that does not prove it was not done or that it is impossible to do. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Not a tenable position, sir.
The point of the article is that NSA are really smart people instead of dumb arses like the Greenwald. Really smart people are also usually really lazy people, at least in the sense of they will do the least work required to get the same reward. There are far easier ways to tap the fiber than getting a sub, digging up the cable, and splicing it.
For starters, since it is highly technical work and the NSA has some of the best people doing that work, it would be far easier to put an NSA guy on the crew laying the cable an tap it as it is laid. No messy splicing required.
> Really smart people are also usually really lazy people
[ ... ]
> it would be far easier to put an NSA guy on the crew laying the cable an tap [ ... ]
@Tom13:
Really nice generalizations based on purely subjective opinions, emphatically stated as facts.
There is a difference between opinion and fact. To a certain degree, everyone is entitled to their own opinions. Not to their own facts.
In this particular case, the relevant fact being: neither you, nor the author of this article, know what NSA did or did not do. The fundamental principle of "those who talk don't know and those who know don't talk" applies here, to both of you.
The author speculates that it couldn't have been done because he doesn't know how it could've been done, therefore it cannot be done. You speculate based on some vaporous general-purpose assertions such as "smart people are lazy" and "there are easier ways of tapping the fiber than using a sub".
None of your general-purpose assertions proves, or creates any speculative inference in support of this article's initial stated premise: that NSA did not tap the underwater fiber optic cable because doing so would require some undefined "super-powers".
...made even less tenable by certain odd facts, such as "...10Kv DC...distance of 45Km between repeaters..."
Maybe this was a typo, or maybe it is true and I don't know my electronics well enough. But, IIRC, there is a very good reason DC isn't used to carry power long distances: It loses a lot of power en route due to the resistance of the material.
This is why AC is used, and it is used at a very high voltage and low (relative) current, as it can easily travel 45Km with little loss of power. Low current produces less heat, but the same total amount of power is being transmitted by being converted from current to voltage.
Make of this "fact" what you will; I think this is a fairly basic error and makes me wonder about the rest of the article. I'm not convinced either way about whether the subject of the arcticle happened or not, I'm simply being cynical.
As others have said, just because you can't picture how it is done, doesn't mean it isn't done, and an error in facts and resulting logic like this perhaps shows the author isn't best placed to extrapolate from the rest of these "facts".
"But, IIRC, there is a very good reason DC isn't used to carry power long distances: It loses a lot of power en route due to the resistance of the material.
This is why AC is used, and it is used at a very high voltage"
You're wrong. I spent years working on the terminal stations of submarine cables. Power feeding is always high voltage DC for a number of sound engineering reasons. You also seem unaware that the standard these days for any new long distance power transmission network is DC - like the UK-France power grid interconnections.
I'm wondering why you'd so thoroughly rubbish the author's article on the basis of a 'fact' you made up. It would only have taken you a minute to check.
maybe it is true and I don't know my electronics well enough
Errr - yes. Sorry...
IIRC, there is a very good reason DC isn't used to carry power long distances: It loses a lot of power en route due to the resistance of the material.
That's nothing to do with it being DC - it's to do with the current flowing in the conductor.
For a fixed-resistance conductor (which it isn't, really, but this will show the effect), the instantaneous power drop over that conductor is i^2R - so doubling the current quaduples the power loss. This is true of AC or DC flow. To counteract this loss, the supply voltage is very high, to reduce the current (for any given load, the power delivery is the product of the voltage and the current, so doubling the voltage halves the current requirement, leading to a quarter of the losses).
The reason AC is usually used is that it is very easy to convert from a high-voltage supply to a more manageable, lower-voltage one with a simple transformer. It has been this way for a very long time, which is why AC is so popular for distribution. DC is much harder to deal with unless you're prepared to accept *massive* losses (which we're not). Modern electronics make it possible, but this is a comparatively recent development compared to the history of power distribution.
I think this is a fairly basic error and makes me wonder about the rest of the article
Yeah, it's not an error...
Vic.
Just one thing: high voltage DC is how you send power for long distances under the sea, to avoid the massive induction losses you'd get if you used AC.
It's been practical to convert DC to AC and back again on the megawatt scale since the very early days of AC power distribution. What you use is motor-generator sets, a technique that's only recently been superseded by heavy-duty semiconductors.
"But, IIRC, there is a very good reason DC isn't used to carry power long distances: It loses a lot of power en route due to the resistance of the material."
DC is used to carry power over long distances, and it shines (so to speak) underwater because it has lower losses than AC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#Advantages_of_HVDC_over_AC_transmission
Biggest problem with the idea of tapping mid-sea is how to carry and process data away. There is no way in hell you can drop a fully blown probe system capable of analyzing traffic and isolating what you want down to continental depths. So you have to run _ANOTHER_ cable to a suitable location passing _ALL_ traffic there. There are only two locations worldwide for which this scenario is realistic - Mediterranean and Gulf. Everywhere else your "home base" is out of reach.
As far as Med and Gulf - the cable density, distances, depths etc there justify tapping at repeaters (that is how this is done, if ever, by the way) and running a short length of cable to your "home base" in a "friendly" Gulf or NATO state.
'Biggest problem with the idea of tapping mid-sea is how to carry and process data away.'
Not really, just take an exclusive rent on one of the other fibres in the bundle, clone the data, encrypt, and send it back up that fibre.
In fact, if I was running a morally dubious intelligence agency (I'm available at reasonable rates) I'd infiltrate the cable laying ships - replace a repeater with one to copy the data I'm interested in and send it back up my private wire(s) in the bundle. Job done.
You don't care about all the data, so filter in the tap and you might only need one fibre to hook out everything of interest in the others.
If you knew anything about submarine cables you would be aware that any fiber cable with an economic capacity doesn't have repeaters, they have amplifiers.
The amplifiers have no ability to extract any data from the analogue payload signal, they don't even know - or care - what the bandwidth of each wavelength is. The only signal an amplifier can interact with, other than making it louder, is the supervisory channel which terminates and is re-originated at each wmp - and that's on a separate wavelength to those used for the payload.
As for those who want to install a sneaky underwater tap - all the DWDM equipment I've worked that is suitable for submarine use has the ability to enable alarms that are designed to specifically monitor for un-authorised (by the cable operator) tapping of the fibers.
We have learned that things many once considered too expensive to be practical* have indeed been implemented. The MASSIVE amounts of money thrown at the NSA to undertake any and all surveillance and collection is obscene and many people erred by vastly underestimating the money the Government was willing to spend to create a surveillance state.
At a basic level, tapping undersea fibre cables is really just a refinement of the process that was used during the cold war - park a special sub above the cable and get to work. That 'work' would of course be ridiculously exacting and require hundreds of millions of dollars of customisations to a submarine but there is absolutely nothing outside the realm of possibility.
Once you assume that there is a submarine so equipped as to enable work on a cable bundle in a suitable (i.e. dry and powered) environemnt, only two questions remain. The first is how they have managed to extract usable data from a fibre without interruption or detection and the second is how they are collecting that data.
Of all the difficulties Richard has raised, the question of collecting the data is actually the biggest because 'tapping' a cable involves copying the data stream somewhere else.
In the now well-known operation during the Cold War to tap a Russian cable, divers went back periodically to swap tapes out. The amount of data flowing through modern undersea fibre links is not trivial to capture and your only two options are to have a device on site that records and is then collected periodically or to run your own cables back to home base.
Laying your own fibre back is HUGELY expensive - much more so than the tapping operations themselves and so is presumably a bridge too far. That leaves on-site collection which, while cheaper, comes with numerous tricky problems, such as the size of the storage you deploy, the electricity to power it (I don't think you could do it from the supplied power of the cable without someone noticing) and, of course, the continual collection of the data from all these taps.
You could reduce the collection requirements by recording only data that matches certain criteria but that would require real-time analysis of quite impressive power, which of course increases the cost and difficulty of installing and powering the device!
HOWEVER, there is no indication that the NSA would undertake such expensive programs where there were significantly cheaper and easier options available. The best option is simply to get the cooperation of the cable operators. If you have that then there is no need to deploy submarines for installation and collection rounds.
It is possible that the NSA are able to tap undersea fibres without the providers knowing.
However, it is far more likely that the providers do know about this and, if so, this would make it pointless to perform the collection undersea.
* - Such as quoting the costs of some outrageous amount of data storage.
And yet the "special sub" exists, as more than an assumption. It has a name, USS Jimmy Carter. The point aimed at those claiming all this is "not likely" instead of "I don't understand". It's widely accepted to be a sub for tapping undersea cables, so what the heck is all this article and doubt about?
I can't explain orbital mechanics, and yet the Saturn V existed.
Jeffy
Yes, I know the sub exists - that's why I mentioned it in my post : )
(Just not by name.)
And, to clear up all this - the 'not likely' part is me saying that the CLAIM of Snowden is not likely, not that tapping undersea fibre is not likely.
For a refresher, the CLAIM that Richard is questioning is that the NSA, with the help and cooperation of the NZ government tapped undersea cables to spy on NZ citizens en masse.
If you have the cooperation of the local government, there really isn't a reason why you would need to go to the trouble of doing all this. As Richard has very rightly pointed out, there are easier, land-based ways to accomplish the goal and they will yield better results!
You, and most others here are arguing that the NSA have the budget and capability to tap undersea fibre. I don't question that at all. It is not technically impossible or even impractical, merely expensive. As I said, myself, many have erred in underestimating what the US Government will spend on these projects.
But, that is not the claim being examined and questioned.
Richard: all of your points boil down not to "it's impossible to tap an undersea cable" but rather "it's incredibly expensive to tap an undersea cable reliably and quickly enough not to get caught.
May I offer some thoughts, from just underneath my tinfoil hat?
Sever the cable at point A. While they are running around trying to fix it, insert a tap at point B. This gives you time to tap it. Your costs drop quite a bit. "Deliriously expensive" becomes "within the realm of possibility for a black ops budget".
Now the question of "how the hell do you get the data out" arises. May I suggest that it might well be possible to put a widget in the "point B" tap that:
1) Is protected to substantial depths
2) Is some form of ridiculously expensive computer in it's own right
3) Does basic inline analysis of traffic
4) Sends anything interesting it finds down the fibre via traffic injection to the NSA*
5) May have a radio link (ULF?) to be updated by the appropriate spook ship that parks on top of it.
6) May even be able to be raised and plugged into a bank of systems on a spook ship to provide real-time streaming into the ship on occasions where it's required.
A tap doesn't have to mirror all traffic at all times to be an effective tool. A tap doesn't have to be accessible 100% of the time to be an effective tool. A tap doesn't have to be a perfect filter to catch interesting things and a tap doesn't have to store all data forever to be an effective tool.
It could just be the equivalent of a plan old-school wiretap capability, but set up in such a way as to be able to bypass all that pesky "jurisdictional cooperation" and "the other guy knowing what you're up to" stuff.
The presumption that these taps exist to spy on the hoi polloi of a country is probably nuts. It's 100% more rational to expect that the NSA would work with most countries to make that happen.
But a tap in order to spy on those in power in the target country is a different story entirely. That needs done without the target country knowing. And what better way for them to think that you don't have that capability than to work both ends and establish a local on-shore tapping capability (which, I am sure, the host country knows how to route around or turn off)?
Tapping communications that someone else knows are insecure is pointless and a waste of money. Finding the means of communication they believe are secure, well...
...I wholeheartedly believe the NSA would gladly pour hundreds of millions of dollars into that. After all...that's what they are actually paid to do.
*Before you start talking about security and "they'd notice that", I don't think they would. Who is going to take the two routers on either end of an undersea cable and lock down the routers to the MAC address of the router on the other end? You control the cable, and thinking that any other MAC address would appear would be paranoid. Do you MAC lock the cables running in your house? Do you run traffic sniffers on your hardwired-only networks to see if someone has tapped it and is injecting traffic? Unless you have some serious tinfoil hattery going on, no...you don't.
@Trevor
I think we are more or less on the same wavelength here but, as I said, I still think that collection is the main issue. Yes, there are options but I believe that the implications of these options don't really match the what one might suspect as the purpose of the exercise.
This is not to say that is couldn't or wouldn't (or doesn't) happen, as I think I make clear in my post. I believe it is not even close to outside the realm of the possible. For me, it's about weighing up the factors and seeing whether this is likely.
One thing we have seen is that the NSA seems to get ore targeted information by getting closer to the source but backs this up by much larger-scale 'dragnet'-style collections.
The most important point to keep in mind, however, is that the NSA apparently did this WITH THE FULL COOPERATION OF THE NEW ZEALAND GOVERNMENT. That is the claim being made. Not that they have selectively tapped undersea fibre in order to spy on their allies' governments, but that one of those governments worked with them to collect data on their citizens.
The context of this announcement is around the NZ elections and proving that the current NZ government is in cahoots with the NSA and lying about spying on NZ citizens. If the revelation was that the NSA was spying on the government itself then that really doesn't serve the purpose. There is the continuing saga for Kim Dotcom and his fight against the NZ government and especially their alleged (though very likely) collusion with the US to subvert local laws.
It seems that you are arguing a different point, which is that the NSA could well tap undersea fibre for the purpose of spying on other governments.
On that, I think we can agree far more readily because this is information that the NSA cannot get easily in other ways or through other agreements.
I have nothing but the highest respect for Richard - he is, and has been for many years, an outstanding journalist who presses his points and works hard to get to the heart of matters and never just regurgitates party lines. None of that means he can;t be wrong but in this instance I think it's important to keep the original claim in mind - that the NZ government worked with the NSA to do spy on its citizens.
And, with that in mind, Richard's assertion that there are easier and therefore MUCH cheaper and more comprehensive avenues available should be assessed favourably.
Perhaps the NSA does indeed tap these lines AS WELL, in order to target the NZ government specifically but that is not the claim being made and challenged.
"It seems that you are arguing a different point, which is that the NSA could well tap undersea fibre for the purpose of spying on other governments."
Yup. I'm not arguing for or against the NSA tapping the specific NSA cable in question. I have no idea if they've done that. And I don't know why they wouldn't just tap the US end of the damned thing and be done with it.
I am arguing that the idea of tapping an undersea cable - if it was determined that there was a practicable need - is not outrageous. That's all.
@Trevor
I'll summarise my long post (though you of all people shouldn't begrudge me that!) with your own words:
"The presumption that these taps exist to spy on the hoi polloi of a country is probably nuts."
I agree. BUT, this is exactly the claim that is being made and the one that I believe Richard is questioning by saying that there are easier methods available. The claim was that the NSA was (and is) doing this with the assistance and cooperation of the NZ government in order to collect data on citizens.
As you say, "probably nuts" to do this by tapping undersea cables.
"Data rate of ULF to slurp data.... ~300baud, not really that useful..."
ULF is actually more like <<1 baud, and probably wouldn't even work down to the ground. What you do there is communicating via sound... which might get you something like 30 baud which may be enough to set a packet filter or to tell the harddisk to float up to the surface.
Actually, it's worse, by orders of magnitude, not just not really that useful, even as a control channel. You can't just transmit VFT over a 3kHz channel width, the actual bandwidth at VLF is measured in Hertz or milliHertz, not kiloHertz. This in no way corresponds with the baseband frequencies of analogue telephone line comms systems, which is where the 300 baud assumptions are comings from. It's far, far worse than you imagine, making it impractical to use as a control system. It reduces the practicality to "on or off", which is effectively pointless, as optical losses are measured continuously.
300 baud is do-able data rate for FEC transmissions in the HF and MF regions of the spectrum, even at LF. At these frequencies, the bandwidth of the antenna and associated matching system are high enough not to impact on the bandwidth of the channel.
A radio transmitter with a wide bandwidth (as a percentage of the centre frequency) is so difficult to match that losses become untennable at even a few tens of herts from then centre frequency. This restricts the bandwidth of the channel (and hence the available shifts and data rates, even in the post-Shannon era, to very low rates indeed.
Radiating a good 7kHz-wide voice signal at 150kHz is difficult, but consider that it's 2.4~ish% of the centre frequency. This example is the bottom of the "LongWave" broadcast spectrum. It's also comparable to some Loran and similar navigation services. Even that produces severe matching problems (trading bandwidth for Q, as Q decreases, bandwidth increases but so do the losses in the amplifier>antenna matching network.
Now, make that 1.5 kHz, the middle of the ULF spectrum, taken as a purely mathematical example. Instead of 150 kHz and you have the same %-age off the centre frequency at only 700Hz from the centre frequency. It's this that limits the effective usable spectral bandwidth of the system, generating the signal isn't so much a a problem, but coupling it to an antenna is, given that the antenna efficiency itself will also be extremely low, due to the long wavelength at ULF. it's doesn't take long before several different power losses of 30dB add up to give you massive power loss. Try minimising antenna losses that by reducing resistive losses and ground losses (requiring massive ground mats and extremely long radial systems. Then you have to increase transmitter power to compensate the matching losses. Before long you're looking at 50kV insulators and several kiloamps of antenna current as you try to trade Q against bandwidth against losses against costs. There's a reason morse was used in the marine MF band and not voice - around 500kHz or lower and matching become a very serious business, so mobile transmitters become problematic in terms of wider matching, given the limited transmitter power available. At higher frequencies, noise (both natural and manmade) was more of a reason to limit signal bandwidth (usually in the receiver system, using high-Q filters, often piezo-quartz filters in superhet designs. These were in the days preceeding DSP weak-signal methods that have revolutionised radio systems in the last 25 years. The antenna matching was far easier due to the manageable antenna proportions at high-MF and HF.
Reducing the spectral utilisation helps immensely, giving a practical (for a superpower defense budget) throughput of single-figure of baud.
For the old US and Russian systems, 76 and 82 Hz respectively using chunks of the planet as the antenna systems (yes, the planet), the problems increase by magnitudes again, making them Extremely Low Fart-rate systems
It's far easier to tap at a friendly landing station; failing that tap undersea. Such "intervention" as these subsea jobs are called is far from impossible, as others have noted. Whether it's worthwhile or not given the expense is another matter. Live-working on 10kV DC systems is not impossible using isolated ROV and robotic systems - I've personally seen it done (on a CCTV feed!) on oilfield jobs at 600Vdc+ with minimal problems other than pumping the environment dry and using live-working tools and equipment. and that was using human divers, albeit carefully. These jobs are not done by choice, only by necessity, but are nonetheless doable in relative safely for the operators concerned.
source : I used to design, tune and match VLF systems. I then spent several years on subsea comms: wideband, voiceband and narrowband, using Hertzian, acoustic and tug-on-a-rope methods.
No matter how logically and coherently you set out your argument I don’t think you will ever convince the ‘tinfoil hat’ brigade. Unfortunately they want to believe that it’s true and that need overrides all reason.
A fine detailed article laid out in a logical progression.
Sadly it will not reach the paranoid few.
But hey, keep it up, articles like this are why I read this site.
@Killing Time
With the disclaimer that Richard is a long-time favourite of mine outside of The Register (a speculative reality, at best), the barriers he mentions - getting to and opening the bundles - are not really the main ones.
All you need is a submarine with the ability to interface with the ocean - through sending divers out and bringing objects in. This already exists.
Once you have the ability to reach the cables and work on them in a suitable environment, nearly all of Richard's concerns evaporate. All that is left is a question of how to tap the cable without anyone realising - and there are already methods to do that - and how to filter/collect/retrieve the data.
The later is, really, the only big issue.
Still, the proposition being flogged is, indeed, rather far-fetched, but not because the technology is odd so much as that the technology would only be deployed for purposes other than those currently alleged.
I don’t doubt you appreciate the author, or that various technologies exist to do difficult things on the bottom of the ocean, I just see endless waffle on this thread built on towering layers of conjecture.
I would say Occam’s Razor is a concept completely alien to the majority of commentards on this particular subject, damn … I‘ve now introduced the possibility of aliens.
If this…if that… If my Auntie had bollocks she would be my Uncle! Well she doesn’t and she isn’t and neither would she circumvent 10KVdc at the bottom of an ocean with a couple of jumpers or any other such nonsense or flight of fancy however eloquently put up here.
I just don’t buy it!
neither would she circumvent 10KVdc at the bottom of an ocean
Well, if you were trying to do something like this, it wouldn't be the James Bond-style working in water in a Newt Suit with a pair of side cutters; you'd do this in a dry room on board a sub. If you'd really prepared properly, you'd be doing it in a normobaric room.
To say that breaking into a subsea fibre cable is "impossible" is simply wrong - it *could* be done. When I was at York, we created a number of tools that would have made this a viable strategy. But it remains both difficult and expensive - and there are several cheaper and easier ways to achieve pretty much the same result.
And that is why I'd be surprised if the cable was tapped under the sea - because I expect it to be tapped on land instead.
Vic.
"To say that breaking into a subsea fibre cable is "impossible" is simply wrong - it *could* be done. "
I thought it was done, and frequently, during the Cold War. I mean, that wasn't FIBER, but most of the same problems for tapping ye olde copper cables were present short of actually tapping an optical fiber: armor, voltage, detection, etc. Or is there something else different to tapping fiber than to tapping copper?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells
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