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NSA/U.S. Navy Working to Intercept Fiber Optic Cables 303

Posted by timothy from the deep-blue-blinkenlights dept.
Jeff Robertson writes: "Fiber optic cables have advantage of being difficult to wiretap. As optical amplifiers replace electro-optical regenerators in undersea routes, it gets even harder. Lightwave Magazine has an article quoting the Washington Post as claiming the National Security Agency 'is known to be hard at work trying to gain access to fiber optic cables' and the U.S. Navy will spend '$1 billion to retrofit its premier spy submarine, the USS Jimmy Carter' to get access to deep-sea fiber routes. They also assert that the U.S. government is bailing out Global Crossing to prevent its undersea routes falling into foreign hands."
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NSA/U.S. Navy Working to Intercept Fiber Optic Cables More

NSA/U.S. Navy Working to Intercept Fiber Optic Cables

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  • rofl (Score:3, Funny)

    by jaredbpd ( 144090 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @05:37PM (#3641062)
    Does anyone else find it hilarious that the top of the line super advanced submarine is named for Jimmy Carter?

    • Re:rofl (Score:4, Flamebait)

      by Daniel Dvorkin ( 106857 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @05:39PM (#3641084) Homepage Journal
      Unlike the current President, Jimmy Carter had a record of honorable active military service.

      • Re:rofl (Score:5, Funny)

        by jaredbpd ( 144090 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @05:44PM (#3641129)
        I'm just saying the could have named it the "USS Badass" or something :)
        • There have been conventions and traditions associated with naming warships, but they're subject to political and romantic whims -- and even in-jokes, such as the aircraft carrier USS Shangri-la, named for FDR's humorous response to a query about where the Doolittle raid on Tokyo launched from. (The source of the name is a fictitious Himilayan country in James Hilton's popular novel Lost Horizon.)

          I liked the USN Submarine Service much better back when attack boats were named for sea creatures (the Growler, the Hammerhead, the Albacore etc.), but Hyman G. "Father of the Nuclear Navy" Rickover screwed that all up: "Fish don't vote!" Thanks to him, we got 688s named for cities for a while there, supposedly to increase voter -- and ultimately Congressional -- support. OTOH, although we now have a new Seawolf, we also have another attack boat named for a state (the Virginia) and one named for a president (the Jimmy Carter).

          I do kinda like USS Badass, though. Might be a good name for one of those Cyclone-class littoral-warfare PCs that support SEAL operations inshore. Maybe her sister ships could be USS Ass Kicker, USS Tough Guy, USS Snake Eater, and USS Get Yer Beady Eyes Offa Me.

    • Re:rofl (Score:5, Interesting)

      by ScuzzMonkey ( 208981 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @05:39PM (#3641086) Homepage
      Well, kind of, unless you happen to know that he was a nuclear submarine officer before he was president. If you know that, then it makes a lot more sense than some naming decisions (USS Ronald Reagan? I guess he probably played a sailor in a movie at some point... oh, and there are all those appropriations bills he signed, yeah).

      • Quote (Score:3, Insightful)

        by 4of12 ( 97621 )

        Jimmy Carter was a wonderful President if your only criterion was to have ethical perfection to balance everyone's disappointment in Richard Nixon.

        Unfortunately, despite all of that, his biggest fault was micromanaging. Tales were told of the 16 hour days Jimmy would put in, but spent his time resolving staff disputes by scheduling use of the White House tennis courts himself.

        Meanwhile, Ronald Reagan just delegated everything out and worked many less hours and, by those measures was a much more effective manager. [For the record, I didn't think much of Ronald's appointees. And, GHB was right, it was voodoo economics.]

        But the quote I remember, that Slashdot should remember, is that:

        Jimmy Carter has been the only President that knew what a Bessel function was.

      • Re:rofl (Score:3, Funny)

        by Teferi ( 16171 )
        There's a funny story about Reagan and subs...
        Once, as an actor, he played the role of a submarine commander, and in a makeshift dressing room aboard the sub (while it was in dock) one day, was practicing his lines.
        The crew heard this, thought it was the real captain speaking, and the sub almost ripped the dock apart before the captain ran up shouting "All stop! All stop, God damn it!"

      • Probably a little too late for a lot of people to see this. But there is a bit of misinformation in your post explained here [usni.org]

        Carter served on a diesel sub and left the navy before working on a nuke. The article gives some good insight into the naming of Naval vessels and Carter's record as funding the Navy goes.

        • Jeez, what a shitstorm... crack a little joke and look at all the hackles that get raised. Some of ya'll need to take yourselves (and the rest of us, by extension) a little less seriously.

          For the record, I've got nothing against Reagan or against naming vessels after non-military figures--especially presidents. I just wanted to clear up some misconceptions of Jimmy; this particular naming decision seems more relevant than most, is all.

          Stoolpigeon, I'll have to check some other sources--but Grolier's, where I checked my original information, disagrees with the article you've cited: Carter Biography [gi.grolier]

          So does the mini-bio on www.americanpresident.org. And, for that matter, the jimmycarter.org site and some site on Georgia history I turned up on Google. I've probably got an auto-biography around the house some place that I can check... interesting if the usni.org blurb is true, though.
      • Ask yourself which was more useful to the Navy: Someone who served honourably once and is retired (thus a ship could be named after him) or someone who fostered whopping huge arms procurement appropriations? One is useful to a Navy (good sailors are worth having), the other is imperative (a whopping whack of good tech is vital). So don't think that naming things "Ronald Reagan" or after any other military-spending president is a bad choice for the service. They know who got them the goodies.

    • I would have titled the article "Jimmy Carter needs fiber".
    • Homer: Hey, do we get to land on an aircraft carrier?
      Pilot: No, Sir, the closest vessel in the USS Walter Mondale [snpp.com]. It's a laundry ship. They'll take you the rest of the way.

      ~Philly
      • A Slashdot story that *doesn't* remind someone of a Simpsons quote is a sign of the apocalypse. Keep'em coming, folks. :)

  • Its necessary (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kpansky ( 577361 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @05:38PM (#3641074)
    Despite the prevalent opinion on Slashdot (and my own) the government does need the ability to monitor telecommunications. Given proper authority by warrants and what-not, the government should be given every possible tool and ability to protect the nation, within sensible limits, always.

    • Its NOT "necessary"! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by suss ( 158993 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @06:02PM (#3641276)
      Despite the prevalent opinion on Slashdot (and my own) the government does need the ability to monitor telecommunications. Given proper authority by warrants and what-not, the government should be given every possible tool and ability to protect the nation, within sensible limits, always.

      How about setting those sensible limits at your borders? Respect other country's privacy for once.
      Stop being a bunch of international bullies/control freaks. The cold war is over.
      • Yes, the Cold War is over and I got several destroyed buildings in lower manhattan and a smashed piece of our military headquarters in Arlington, VA that says there is a hot war on now.

        • Re:Its NOT "necessary"! (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Yes,..two buidlings down is the easy answer
          for everything from wiretapping to the drug war.

          There is no 'war' on terrorism...only on certain terrorists. The US still fully supports any terrorist or criminal group that suits their goal,
          sorta like your old buddy Bin Laden did before he got a little uppity.
          I presume that the Saudis who are involved up to their eyeballs in 9-11 must still be useful to the US oil interests or else there would have been a big oil slick where that country once stood.

          This topic does brings back the same question that terrorism always does?
          If the US is allowed to do something, why shouldnt another country be allowed to do the same?

        • So, does every country that's at war have the right to spy on you now? It's OK for India and Pakistan to tap your lines? For Russia to check your mail? Because that's what it's tantamount to. If it's right for the US, it's right for everyone.
        • Uhmmmm ..... war? As I recall my Social Studies, Congress declares war. And the last time the US Congress declared war was 1941.
          • Uh, actually Congress declared war on drugs in 1986. Really. I kid you not. Busted for possession? Surrender as a prisoner of war and claim your Geneva Convention rights. They can't even bring you into a civilian court. Congress is a joke these days.

            Personally I wonder why exactly the US refused the offer that Sudan made several years ago to turn over Usama Bin Laden to us.
      • How about setting those sensible limits at your borders? Respect other country's privacy for once. Stop being a bunch of international bullies/control freaks. The cold war is over.

        Why? Nations spy on each other. They always have, and are going to continue to do so for the forseeable future. We spy on other countries. They spy on us. It's a tool of statecraft, and damn nessecary one because when you sit there and just assume that everyone is honest and has your best interests at heart, you usually end up sitting there with a dumb look on your face when
        somebody starts smashing planes your buildings (Of course, we may have had the information to stop this - or may not have. Once you have it, processing it is hard) or those "presidential palaces" actually contain bio weapons facilities.

        What country are you from that doesn't have any form of intelligence agency, hmm?

    • Warrants?? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Gorimek ( 61128 )
      Dude, the NSA doesn't need warrants. It does whatever the hell it pleases.

      Remember that this country was ruled by J Edgar Hoover for decades, since he as the head of the FBI could crush any US politician, including most Presidents, that didn't comply with his demands.
  • ...are belong to us now!
  • after scratching thier heads for a long time and saying "The files are in the cable?"

  • second part makes sense (Score:1, Informative)

    by tps12 ( 105590 )
    I can see why we'd spend money making sure we control strategic communications channels. Remember that that cable, like the US interstate system and the Internet's predecessor (ARPAnet), were designed at least partially for military applications in the even of thermonucular warfare. Granted, today it's all just part of the international pr0n industry, but you have to remember that there was a reason the military dished out all that money in the first place.
    • Woo! Let's hear it for the Eisenhower Interstate System!

      Seriously, there was some good thought that went in there, 1 mile out of 5 had to be straight for emergency aircraft landings, and it's the easiest way to move a tank from Seattle to Los Angeles :)
      • " mile out of 5 had to be straight for emergency aircraft landings"

        This actually isn't true..

        From : [snopes2.com]

        "Richard Weingroff, information liaison specialist for the Federal Highway Administration's Office of Infrastructure and the FHA's unofficial historian, says the closest any of this came to touching base with reality was in 1944, when Congress briefly considered the possibility of including funding for emergency landing strips in the Federal Highway-Aid Act (the law that authorized designation of a "National System of Interstate Highways"). At no point was the idea kited of using highways or other roads to land planes on; the proposed landing strips would have been built alongside major highways, with the highways serving to handle ground transportation access to and from these strips. The proposal was quickly dropped, and no more was ever heard of it.

        Some references to the one-mile-in-five assertion claim it's part of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. This piece of legislation committed the federal government to build what became the 42,800-mile Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, which makes it the logical item to cite concerning regulations about how the interstate highway system was to be laid out. The act did not, however, contain any "one-in-five" requirement, nor did it even suggest the use of stretches of the interstate system as emergency landing strips. The one-out-of-five rule was not part of any later legislation either. "

        • Its also not feasible... it would have been possible back in the prop plane age... but the force of a jet landing would destroy most pavement. (Airport runways are made of a special higher strength concrete)
  • Anyone afraid of major backbone outages when some big honking spy sub hovers a little too close to the cable?
  • ... they tap all those ocean-floor fiber optic cables. How do they find the useful information within that gigantic stream of data? And what about steganography? Besides, real terrorists seem to prefer hand-written notes. OTOH, maybe they're not interested in the terrorists ...

  • Sharks or Seals? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Subcarrier ( 262294 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @05:43PM (#3641123)
    U.S. Navy will spend '$1 billion to retrofit its premier spy submarine, the USS Jimmy Carter' to get access to deep-sea fiber routes.

    Every time the trans-Atlantic connections are down they give us this same line about the "sharks who like to chew on cables", and all the while it has been a bunch of Navy SEALs trying to patch an optical wiretap, equipped with a combat knife and a legth of wire?
  • Life imitating fiction, particularly that particular piece of fiction, is becoming passe.

  • USS Jimmy Carter? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by toupsie ( 88295 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @05:45PM (#3641133) Homepage
    U.S. Navy will spend '$1 billion to retrofit its premier spy submarine, the USS Jimmy Carter' to get access to deep-sea fiber routes.

    Oh jeez, I had to read the article to make sure this wasn't some sort of Simpsons joke. I know, I know, Jimmy was a Nuke Engineer on a Sub before he drove the country into double digit inflation and created the misery index while wearing a sweater. But I was shocked that he already had a military ship named after him. Anyone know what the rules are for that? Is it a military thing or a Congressional?

    I thought this was interesting:

    They also assert that the U.S. government is bailing out Global Crossing to prevent its undersea routes falling into foreign hands.

    The Global Crossing bankruptcy is as large as Enron but the Press hasn't hyped it as much. There have been many conspiracy theories as to why. This might be the real reason and not because the DNC Nation Chairman turned $100,000 into $18 million. The press might be protecting National Security because the Government has told them to shut up over the bankruptcy. Rumor was that the communist Chinese were itching to get their hands on it just like the Panama Canal. Anyone remember how communist Chinese got that? (Well at least both entry points).

    • Oh jeez, I had to read the article to make sure this wasn't some sort of Simpsons joke. I know, I know, Jimmy was a Nuke Engineer on a Sub before he drove the country into double digit inflation and created the misery index while wearing a sweater. But I was shocked that he already had a military ship named after him. Anyone know what the rules are for that? Is it a military thing or a Congressional?

      I'm not sure if they're still following any specific naming rules like they used to, but if you see this puppy [navy.mil] in or around your nation you might want to check those undersea lines. :-)

    • Re:USS Jimmy Carter? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Jimmy Carter is one of the reasons our nuclear subs are such powerful foes. He made the main contribution to the nautilus class engine, the gimbled reactor. Which allows the sub's nuclear pile to maintain control even when inverted.

      Previously, the ships had to keep within a tight tilt angle (20 degrees or so) or else the cooling water drained from the pile and the reactor could overheat.

      That's one of the theory's surrounding the russian Kursk fiasco. The ship tilted outside the specified angles after impact, forcing them to shut down the reactor. Once the reactor was shut down, the ship did not have the reserve capacity to surface, operate bilge or life support.
      Bummer.

      BTW: Carter was on the fast track in the Navy, he had to leave the forces when his father died to go back to Georgia and run the family business (peanut farming). While I think he was an awful president, he is a very smart man who contributed much to the county and the world. Even though his military policies, in a word, sucked.

      • Jimmy Carter is one of the reasons our nuclear subs are such powerful foes. He made the main contribution to the nautilus class engine, the gimbled reactor. Which allows the sub's nuclear pile to maintain control even when inverted. Previously, the ships had to keep within a tight tilt angle (20 degrees or so) or else the cooling water drained from the pile and the reactor could overheat.

        Thanks for that insight. I have always respected Jimmy Carter as a human being and knew the guy was super smart. His work after office shine more on him than his 4 years running the country. It was just sad to see him being used by Castro a month ago for propaganda purposes. I think he is looking back at that trip and kicking himself for making the statement that Castro was not producing chemical/bio weapons then was prevented from visiting the factory in question by Castro after Carter had made the statement.

        The problem with the Presidency is that the smartest people seem to be the people worse suited to the job. I think Douglas Adams made allusions to this in HHGTG.

    • I would have thouht that "USS Richard Nixon" would have been a more sensible name for an espionage boat. Then you could also have the "USS Oliver North" cruising around to act as a decoy.

      Xix.

  • this is not news. (Score:5, Informative)

    by discogravy ( 455376 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @05:45PM (#3641135) Homepage

    "The NSA is spying, and trying to get better at it."

    Well, duh. That's what the NSA does. Good article on a GREAT book about the NSA. [salon.com] Heard the author speaking on NPR a while ago, which drove me to pick up the book. Excellent, excellent book.

  • Not saying this isn't news... (Score:4, Informative)

    by ScuzzMonkey ( 208981 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @05:46PM (#3641139) Homepage
    But I don't think it's new news. Those agencies have been actively (and presumably successfully) tapping fiber optic cables since the late eighties or so. Blind Man's Bluff [amazon.com] details the difficulties in running the taps and the techniques used to overcome them. Interesting read, whether you're for or against.
    • I was going to post a link to the very same book, but you beat me to it.

      Also, check out the old but interesting Submarine [amazon.com], a nonfiction Tom Clancy factfest that has lots of detail on the Jimmy Carter class boats. The Jimmy Carter was designed as a 'special projects' boat from the beginning.

    • In Blind Man's Bluff, the book covers tapping a coax cable in the 70s, by placing a device which detects RF below it, without physically modifying the cable at all. This is a lot different that tapping an optical fiber, but still pretty tricky to do.
      • I'll have to re-check that, then--I admit I didn't have the book to hand, but I do recall a very detailed explanation of a fiber tap (and I know it was fiber because of the lengths that they had to go to in order to avoid diffusing the light while putting the tap into place) and I could have sworn it was in there; that's the only book I've read even remotely related to the subject. I recall the RF detector as well, but I'm pretty sure I'm not confusing the two--the process for getting into the fiber stands out pretty vividly in my mind.
  • the House Subcommittee on International Economic Policy heard testimony from the Director of the Center for Security Policy, Frank J. Gaffney, who complained about the Clinton administration's trade policy: "The People's Republic of China received sophisticated micro-bathymetry equipment, 6,000-meter-capable video, and side-scan sonar systems from the United States.

    That there were no criminal charges for the way the DNC sold this country down the river for campaign contributions is amazing. We do not take China seriously and that is an error.

  • Sept. 11 (Score:5, Funny)

    by BlueFall ( 141123 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @05:52PM (#3641182)
    It's ironic that the article talks about terrorists using these things, so they need to tap fiber. Hasn't it become clear from the news of the last week or so that the FBI, CIA, etc. have plenty of information, they just don't know how to use it?
  • Why not just intercept the cable before it goes under water? Seems a lot easier... or teach a dolphin to intercept the communications...

    bling bling

  • Fiber is very easy to tap. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @05:53PM (#3641193)
    I saw at a local junk shop around 10 years ago a fiber tap. It is a clamp the holds the fiber and bends the fiber at the same time with a pickup. The pickup just looks at the leaked light at the bend.
    • And this results in significant signal drop. On a transcontinental cable, this is most likely the same as an outage.
    • Right, and what are they going to do with that raw data flood? Ok, sure, with enough hard drive space they can log every bit going from here to China and back (changing the tape backups every few seconds, but it's possible in theory). Grepping through that for "osama sez nuke the pentagon at midnite" is way beyond their computational resources.
  • Tapping fiber is easy, if you can get to it.

    --Blair

    • Re:Silly article. (Score:3, Insightful)

      by saridder ( 103936 )
      Not that I'm doubting you, but how does one TAP huge fiber pipes? I know how to do it with a few strands, but dwdm? Also, is this legal and thirdly, how will they store the incredible abount of data flying through the pipes?
      • International folks- and your communications with them- are offered no protection under our constitution. So it's perfectly legal.

        I have no clue how they would store it- some discussion has postulated that it would be analyzed on-site, and only relevant parts stored for later retrieval. They'd periodically have to update it's rules, but that wouldn't be hard with it in place.
      • Just curious... How many strands are there in an "average" cross-oceanic fiber run?

        One [alaskaunited.com] of three (well, two if you don't count spurrs) hooking Alaska to the rest of the U.S. (1,995 undersea miles) only has 4 strands, and it's designed such that "Each fiber pair can be upgraded to OC-192 by adding shore-based electronics without changing the wet plant."

        How much (theoretical) trans-continental bandwith is there?
        • Lots of neat info can be found here [com.com].

          Such as the fact that this project has been underway for over a year (the article is dated last year, and states

          ...the Navy is deep into a five-year, $1 billion retrofit of the USS Jimmy Carter...)

          and the bit that I was looking for

          Most undersea cables now typically contain eight such strands, or fibers.


          I can't imagine that number has changed too much in the past year.
      • well, it must be possible, otherwise the government probably wouldnt spend this many billions to do it. the NSA is already at least 15-20 years ahead of the state-of-the-art cryptography scene (well, probably that far ahead given the DES elliptical analysis thing that was recently revealed), maybe they have substantial hardware capabilities as well?

        the nsa has top talent, infinite cash, infinite resources (like, gimme your best nuclear sub for a pet project, mr Navy Man.) while the us government's ability to waste money on ridiculous projects cannot be understated, when the nsa is involved, you gotta wonder what they really have up their sleeve.
  • It's not about to happen in the future. This is already happening. I believe an earlier Slashdot article (or maybe I heard it somewhere else) linked to an article that described their technique for doing it, which involved bending the optical fiber in a certain way.

    Interesting that it's now being reported as something that's going to happen in the future. A little revisionist history may be at work, or maybe a reporter who hasn't really done his homework.

  • A sad fate for Carter (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Zen Mastuh ( 456254 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @05:54PM (#3641201)

    This man's life is dedicated to peace, so they name a war machine after him. I know he was a nuke engineer and that is the reason for the dubbing.

    Now that we are in a constant state of war, the USS Jimmy Carter will allow all messages of the enemy du jour to be intercepted [and modified] by the military industrial complex. Great

    • Whether a submarine is considered a war machine or not depends on your perspective. Those serving on submarines will likely tell you that they are working for peace.

      Former President Carter visited several submarines, including SSN 688, the Los Angeles [la-ex.org] . He was a nuclear power qualified submarine officer during his service in the Navy [navy.mil].

      Given that history, I hardly think he was insulted when the boat was named after him.

    • He also raised his right hand and dedicated his life to the defense of the United States -- twice -- once as a sailor, the second time as an elected Federal official. He wasn't merely a "nuke engineer"; he was a commissioned officer in the United States Navy, and he was the first USN Submarine Service veteran to serve as President of the United States. That, my peacenik friend, is the reason for naming the submarine after him.

  • Oh no! They're stealing our routes! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Protect the BGP peering relationships! By god, man that Exchange point sailor! Don't drop any packets until you see the whites of their eyes!

    Global Crossing's global route table is only the first step, next thing you know the Chinese will be invading PAIX and coked-up narco-columbians will be running rampant at the MAEs!

  • Sniff... (Score:2, Informative)

    by TweeKinDaBahx ( 583007 )
    It's a real drag that the US Government needs to monitor global telecommunications, but there are good reasons behind it. At least what many citizens of the US and myself consider good reasons...

    Sure, keeping terrorism, global crime, and child porn under control are part of it, but where does the line get drawn? If the US can tap these lines, what's to say that other countries aren't entitled to do the same? What's to say they aren't already?

    I can understand the need for cyberintelligence and early warning, but I feel the need to bring up the issue of privacy in general. There's so little privacy on the 'net already, do we really need big brother watching what we do in even more depth?

    Uncle Sam doesn't have the right to read my mail, but if the government is tapped into the global trunk, sniffing every packet, what's to say they won't read my e-mail, catalouge my credit cards, and track my information habits?

    There is a line that must be drawn, and it should be drawn before it's too late.

  • Failsafe Business Opportunity ! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Taco Cowboy ( 5327 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @05:57PM (#3641225) Journal


    I believe I have seen the light.

    In a business climate such as this, where the US will bail out Global Crossing just to ensure that the business won't "fall into foreign hands", I think we, the slashdotters who are out to make a buck or two, should sit up and take attention !

    1. Go set up your own underwater fibre cable laying / operating company.

    2. Go to the banks and take BILLIONS and BILLIONS of loans.

    3. Either by some existing money loosing underwater fiber cable operation, or lay some more cable on the already saturated routes.

    4. If your business loose one USD on the operation, cook the book so that it looks like it's making one USD, and so on.

    5. In the meantime, make yourself rich by pocketing a portion of the "difference", between the actual accounting, and the one the "cooked book" is showing. The rest of the difference, you can always invite Dick Cheney or whoever is from the Bush adminstration, to join your "Board of Directors", and let them pocket the rest of the loot.

    6. Sooner or later, the "cookery" will be exposed. By that time, you would have BILLIONS in reserve, and you will have Dick Cheney and/or others from the Bush adminstration working FOR you, and covering up all your criminal act.

    7. Under the guise of "national security", with the reason that your company is "too important to fall into foreign hands", the Bush adminstration will BUY UP YOUR CRUMBLED COMPANY, and they will PAY YOU A HANDSOME PROFIT too !

    8. When you done all that, please don't forget www.slashdot.org. Donate some of your loot here, so all of us can continue to enjoy /.

    Thank you very much for your attention.

    PS: The above is for educational purpose only. Neither Slashdot nor I will assume any liability on anything, if you are stupid enough to do what I've just written above.

    PPS: But of course, if you become richer than God, then, please, share your loot with all of us, thank you!

  • A while back the Wall Street Journal had an article that supposedly in the mid 1990's the NSA figured out how to tap undersea fiber cables without tipping off the engineers monitoring them. Supposedly they had a submarine that could pluck the cable from the ocean floor. Then somehow they cut it with special mirrors that would retransmit the signal and not alert the engineers that the cable had been cut.

    The article was in the paper around a year ago and if you want to look it up you have to shell out $$$ for the online WSJ subscription that may have it archived.
    • Forgot to add. The biggest challenge for the NSA was figuring out how to filter and sort through the info. If they did it 5 years ago then chances are that by now they wrote a program to filter all the info and categorize it.
    • They're probably responsible for some fiber outages.

      Once an ISP with two international lines had outages.

      ISP was told by Telco - some trawler broke one line, then a few hours later broke the other one.

      OK maybe it was a trawler or the Telco...

      Cheerio,
      Link.

  • Tap this! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by rleisti ( 581240 )

    Just in time, quantum cryptography [itworldcanada.com] for the masses.

    A swiss company has recently announced a commercial product allowing a fiber optic channel to be secured with quantum cryptography; this would make tapping (without detection) impossible.

    Of course, they could get meaner and ban anyone's right to secure outgoing fiber, which I suppose they would.

  • This could be the start of a trend in sub naming. If the NSA named their sub the Jimmy Carter because of carter's service on a sub, maybe they could continue this practice of naming ships after presidential habits. Think of the possibilities?

    USS Bill Clinton : The boat never seems to work quite the way everyone wants it too, and its outer hull is exceptionally slick. Easy to Catch, but tough to prove it really did something wrong.

    USS Willaim Howard Taft : Big, unwieldy, Just kind of sits there and looks odd.

    USS George Bush : Another spy ship along the lines of the Bill Clinton. A mistake in the shipyard causes the orders to say one thing and do another. Open switches close valves, and vice versa. Expected service life is only half that of a normal ship. Recently underwent minor modifications and re-entered service under the Name USS George W. Bush

    USS Ronald Regan : Essentially useless as a spy ship as it sufffers continual memory errors. Those who served on the Regan however continue to tout the ship as the greatest ship in the inventory, asking monuments to it be built, and crediting the ship with single handedly winning every war since korea. the rest of the navy just rolls their eyes while waiting for it to be mothballed

    USS Gerald Ford : Pressed into service after the scrapping of the USS Richard Nixon (removed from service after being too effective), The Ford has suffered from no less than 18 dry dock accidents, mostly relating to the ship rolling off the pillars used to support it.
    • ObSimpsons:

      Homer: "Do we get to land on an aircraft carrier?"
      Pilot: "No, Sir, the closest vessel in the USS Walter Mondale. It's a laundry ship."
    • USS Gerald Ford : Pressed into service after the scrapping of the USS Richard Nixon (removed from service after being too effective), The Ford has suffered from no less than 18 dry dock accidents, mostly relating to the ship rolling off the pillars used to support it.
      This sub is equipped with a unique offensive weapon system capable of firing golf balls at great velocity, but dubious accuracy.
  • Lest we forget that China built a fiber [newsmax.com] communication network in afghanistan. That, with the latest intelligence debacle, well
    IMHO, if tapping any communication medium will assist in the thwarting of terrorist activity, well we need something.
    Noone would have considered this applicable 3 years ago.
    Usually, with that size of budget, there are definately some dark ops. No wonder we (as in the U.S.) are developing methods to
    Xray [state.sd.us] people as they wander through airports.

    Someone to ask about the plans and what the impact will be is Secretary of the Navy Gordon England [navy.mil].
    Understandably, I am sure he would not delve into the detailed tie-in and the way the Govt. is using 9/11 to move projects like thas ahead.
    Crossing's Creditors' Committee press releases [globalcrossing.com] show how critical it was for the Govt to bail them out. With clients like
    K.B. [globalcrossing.com] toys to sell their pipe to, it is amazing that they are not rolling in cash.
    Stratgetically, there is concern because"For a very low price, someone is going to acquire a set of undersea fiber routes that crisscross the Atlantic and Pacific oceans and connect over 20 nations and perhaps resell or lease the network at a handsome profit to another party that could have its very own undersea communications network and training ground. The bankruptcy court had set April 23 as the deadline to receive proposals to take over the now-bankrupt GX.
  • Somewhere, deep underneath the surface of the ocean in the Pacific Basin...

    *snip*

    "Oops"

    Hmm...Wonder what THAT fiber splicer would charge per hour?
  • I fail to realize why a billion dollars has to be spent on tapping underwater cables when you can do it on land node on one end. Money being wasted again...what a shock!

  • Echelon (Score:3, Informative)

    by frovingslosh ( 582462 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @06:31PM (#3641486)
    If it's on fiber, they already have it! Do a little research into Echelon. Just one example, apparently our friend the Brits have detoured almost every piece of fiber over ther through a US NSA facility.

  • Jimmy Carter will kick your tush. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Mittermeyer ( 195358 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @06:47PM (#3641615) Homepage
    Here [navy.mil] is a link describing wht the Jimmy Carter is getting- basically a bigger SEAL delivery system, probably with the ability to drop a carried bathysphere or other goodies.

    The Jimmy Carter is too high value a ship to just keep out on fiber patrol- independent of her spec-ops function she can pretty much conventionally destroy most navies by herself thanks to that 50-weapon loadout, being quieter running at speed then the Los Angeles subs at dock, and that wide-aperture sonar. So making her a $3 billion dollar satellite feed doesn't make sense.

    Therefore they must be planning to hook into the fiber-optic network, and spool off their own fiber line to a discrete uplink several hundred miles away. The upgrade must be to allow for all that equipment.
  • I worked on a project with a company in California back in the mid-80s that took advantage of an non-intrusive optical coupler that they had patented. The coupler placed a microbend in the fiber and cound extract or insert light from the fiber. In the extract mode, it was almost impossible to measure the attenuation change in the light and detect the coupling. Of course, doing this underwater is a bit tricky.

    I had always assumed that the government made covert use of this technology. Who knows?

  • It's not plain SONET on those fibers... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Papineau ( 527159 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @07:53PM (#3641966) Homepage
    I worked for two different fiber optics equipment companies (although a large part of the second company had worked for the first previously).

    One of the problems I see is that once the optical signal is inside the network, it's encoded in a special manner, diffferent for each equipment (to improve performance, add more error checking, force the carrier to continue to buy from the same vendor). So you can't just listen to it the same way as a phone line. What's in the fiber under the ocean is not as standard as what's on a copper line.

    Also, how are you supposed to interpret it? Given a single wavelenght ans OC-192 speeds, it's 10Gb/s (bit, not byte). If you multiply by the maximum number of wavelengths that a fiber can carry (~160), you get 1600Gb/s. It begins to be a bit too much for the kind of computer that we can buy, although the NSA can probably afford it. But then, would they put it on a sub? Or relay the raw information to a ground station?

    Other problem: sequential packets are not guaranteed to pass by the same fiber, or even the same carrier. There's probably a good chance that they do, but no guarantee ("We intercepted the following message: "The next target is S...". The rest went somewhere else. If you live in a city starting by S, please don't panic."). Unless they want to spy on privately owned fibers, where they're more sure to get all they want in that fiber...
    • And if they could relay it to the ground from a sub, without running a new fibre, we would be sending transoceanic signals wirelessly, now, wouldn't we? :) It seems to me they'll have to do it close to the shore in order to run a fibre to somewhere where the heavy computing power can be set up.
      -Cruz
    • "One of the problems I see is that once the optical signal is inside the network, it's encoded in a special manner, diffferent for each equipment (to improve performance, add more error checking, force the carrier to continue to buy from the same vendor)."

      Your assuming that those spying won't know the manner in which the signal is encrypted - but when Lucent, Nortel, Alcatel or good forbid Corvis will gladly sell you the box, this problem is much less severe. Buy the box, and reengineer it - or hell, just use it to do your deciphering! As for transmitting the data back to be decrypted - they'd probably just run a cable back to shore. Not that hard - but a little time consuming. But not what they are likely to do.

      What they are much more likely to do than any harebrained fiber cabletaping scheme (at least for commercial cable - governmental would be different) is to tap the cable when it comes to ground - at the comshack with the amplifiers, etc. This is orders of magnitude less difficult, and much less likely to be damaged. More than likely the NSA already has for all of the cables leaving the US.

      The fish.

  • This is just FUD (Score:4, Informative)

    by Fefe ( 6964 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2002 @08:07PM (#3642058) Homepage
    ...to make you believe that those cables aren't already tapped. Even the Stasi secret service from the format East Germany was able to tap fiber optics. This is no problem at all, the only problem is that while you apply the tap, the line is interrupted. So, if you tap the line while it is installed, nobody is the wiser.


    Also, tapping the repeaters is no problem, and in the Echelon discussion, at least one photo of a US submarine designed explicitly for installing taps on submarine cables and repeaters was publicized.


    There is no reason to believe that the submarine cables aren't tapped by every major secret service. And even if they weren't, the points where the cables leave the sea and the major routers, POTS switches and exchange points are tapped.


    Also, the paragraph about Global Crossing is bogus or even a Red Herring. Nobody in their right mind would rely on a line not being tapped, especially an international line. Their lines leave the sea to enter Europe or whatever country somewhere, and you can be sure that they are tapped there by the respective country and their allies.

  • If you take bare fibre, in the dark, it glows! Now I don't know too much about the field, but it would seem that the glow is the data. If they can pick data off of blinkenlights, surely the glow can be reconstructed?

    Or do I just have really, really, bad fibre?
  • I forget which talk I was at (and of course by whom), but the speaker was formerly involved in the operations of the fiber landing at Sea Girt, NJ (lots of it lands there, apparently). The lines would go down for a few seconds every once in a while, then come back up. They knew a tap was being installed. There was supposedly a ship that would lift the fiber to sea level to do the work, then lower it back down. A buoy was placed to amplify the signal.

    This is pretty old news. A submarine seems overly complicated. I suspect the story is FUD.

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