Comment by outworlder

12 years ago

Fiber optic links are not so easily compromised. Not without service interruption, which will raise quite a few eyebrows.

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outworlder

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ck2  12 years ago

The US has submarines which are entirely designed to splice fiber optics without interruption.

They literally bring part of the cable into the sub and work on it from there.

  • chubot  12 years ago

    Citation for that? Seems plausible but I'm interested in any details.

    • jellicle  12 years ago

      http://cryptome.org/eyeball/mmp/jimmy-carter.htm

      Apparently the procedure is to position the USS Jimmy Carter over the cable, send out a remote vehicle to grab the cable and pull it up to the sub, splice in tapping equipment, and then drop the cable.

      Intercontinental cables are less than one inch in diameter in deep water. If the sub plants the tap in deep water, it's extremely unlikely that anyone would ever discover it. There are a few cable repair ships that pull broken cables to the surface and fix them, but other than that... No one can reach it and no one will bother it.

      The most interesting thing is actually getting the data back to the U.S. Do they run a separate cable alongside the existing cable? Getting SMALL bits of data back to the U.S. is easy, can just broadcast it. But LARGE amounts of data? Tricky.

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