I can imagine all sorts of methods. Yes, in-line parsing would probably be the best method, as it would greatly reduce the storage/transmission requirements. As for transmission, I’d probably just store it, if I thought that my tap was in a secure location. Again, at this point I’m simply defending the argument that it’s not that far-fetched for a government to do something like this. They’ve done it before, after all, as you’d note if you read my link. Even with that, I’m still considering it likely to be a strange coincidence at this time.
ISPs? What makes you think, if this was for information gathering purposes, that internet traffic is all they care about?
You do realize that it’s not like the old days, where almost all traffic went through either the US or UK at some point, correct? The Middle East is going to have a metric shitload of incoming and outgoing traffic that will “pop out of the water” far from either of those two landmasses.
First you bring up Echelon, and then you want to go to parabolic microphones? Shit, talk about the opposite ends of the spectrum.
Why don’t you get specific. Is this something you think a government couldn’t do, or wouldn’t do, and why?
You don’t need a tap. I realize that in the past they have done it…but it’s like saying that in the past we used buggy whips so we should use them on our cars now to. At this point I think I’ll just leave it at that…you don’t need a physical tap, you don’t need, you don’t need to store the data and collect it days/weeks/months later (what GOOD would it be if you stored it?).
Who do you think controls those pipes…and exactly what kind of data do you think is traversing it? How do you suppose the data gets from one end to the other? ISP’s route more than ‘internet traffic’.
Yeah…I’m kind of aware of that. Thanks for the update though.
-XT
Well according to your article people are wanting to try it, but I don’t think that the data is as inaccessible due to hardware constraints as you make it out to be. Echelon as it was used multiple methods of grabbing the data, and one I assume would be actually listening to real sound.
As for the data transmission, how closed are national networks really? I mean I’ve done traceroutes where the packet goes to Europe and back before hitting up a website in New Jersey. It would seem that the US would have many places on the ground to tap into the networks. Then of course there is Van Eck phreaking, which is the 21st century’s answer to parabolic microphones.
Perhaps they are tapping the fiber optic cables at the bottom of the ocean but I am going to think that Hayden is being candid here. From what I’m told it isn’t accessing the info that’s hard in most cases, it’s getting around the political will. This is why we know who the known terrorist supporters are, they can be someo f the biggest clients and now part owners in Giuliani Partners, but it is the political will that keeps them safe.
The 300 Hz radio band used by Project Elf is open. 
Still it’s mighty odd having all these cables go down in such a short time and with no obvious cause.
Since data tapping is unlikely, and there’s no sign of an imminent conflict, if someone is up to something, it must be for another reason.
Perhaps someone is installing a filtering system which’ll make it easy to shut down portions of the traffic at a future date?
You keep saying this, but thus far have not provided any proof for it. How would you go about capturing all of the data going across those cables and sending it to the U.S. without being detected?
As I said, I’d hack the traffic at the router/upper layer switch and probably use an agent (i.e. a program) to parse the traffic for specific things I’m looking for (myself, I’d parse it on porn but I guess the government would use other criteria). Perhaps I’d look for encrypted traffic, say, or in the clear traffic with specific tells (say ‘Al Queda’ or ‘Bin Laden’ or perhaps ‘Bomb’). I would then encrypt and compressed the captured traffic and stream it to some third party relay, perhaps through an already hacked system in another country.
Not really all that hard to do any of this stuff, especially if I had the resources of a nation state. I’d need to know the internal logical addressing structure of whoever is the provider on one end of the pipe…which wouldn’t be all that hard to get, again especially if I’m the US government (or the Iranian government for that matter…all it takes is enough money to buy some good IT people who are not high on scruples).
-XT
Isn’t that going to require transmitting the data back to the U.S., or to somewhere to do processing on it?
Yeah…as would a tap. The difference is that if you put in a tap you will have to find some out of band way to get the data back to the US, it will probably not be in near real time (in fact, it will probably be days or weeks before you get it), and you will still have to parse it in situ.
Look…you know this. Even if you aren’t a computer person you know in general how this work. Think it through. You know that if I am a hacker and I want to get your Visa card data, say, that I can put an agent on your machine that tosses back all of your critical data to some relay that lets me look at it. Now…multiply that times thousands of people who are having this happen to them as we speak. And these are just businesses or even just some schlubs in a basement somewhere. Think what a nation state with the resources of a nation state can do.
If I can think of a way to do it, we are probably talking about it being 2 years out of date (if not more). I’m not a top tier network engineer (though I AM pretty good for what I am), though I’ve worked for ISP’s as well as large fortune 500 companies. A tap like you guys are envisioning is like something out of the 70’s…you don’t NEED to do that layer 1 stuff anymore.
If you don’t want to buy that…well, that’s fine. You guys are free to think what you want.
Man, some of you guys are drawing awfully certain and sweeping conclusions based on almost no data. Frankly, I could probably brainstorm a hundred different scenarios for people to do this. For example:
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Stock manipulation. Any big deals going down right about now that would be disrupted by this? Anyone short some stock in these companies? Does anyone have anything to gain by making the communications infrastructure in the region look unstable?
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al Qaida doing it to make the U.S. look bad, knowing that many people will instantly assume the U.S. is at fault.
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al Qaida doing it to lash out at the rich gulf states like Dubai and Qatar, which they see as being damned near apostates, what with their big money, fancy beaches and sports cars, and such.
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al Qaida making a symbolic attack on the internet, as it is a source of trouble in the ME region.
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Someone sending a message. Maybe two weeks ago Russia offered someone a deal they couldn’t refuse, and told them that if they didn’t play ball, there’s no telling what troubles they could have. Then bam, their internet goes down after some mysterious cable breaks…
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The U.S. IS tapping the lines. Unlike Xtisme, I’m not nearly so certain as to what kind of traffic those lines contain. Is it so impossible that some governments in the region have contracted to have some secure communications links fed over that fiber?
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Industrial sabotage. Any competitors to these companies? Satellite communications companies, for example?
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Currency manipulation. Currently, Dubai and other countries in the region are buying up lots of U.S. debt. What effect could a few hours’ delay in a transaction have, and who would benefit?
And I’m sure there are a lot of other potential scenarios. It’s a big, complex world full of bad actors, and there is a lot of deep sea mining and diving equipment around and available for surplus.
Or, it could be a freak coincidence, a common-mode failure of some sort, or other natural or accidental cause.
I’m certainly not ready to tell anyone absolutely who it must or can’t be.
Yes, it would. However, doing it over the existing network requires that you send the entire content of that cable over networks controlled by different companies and countries. Don’t you think they are going to notice this happening and put a stop to it?
I thought it would be obvious that the solution you are talking about doesn’t work if you want the entire cable’s traffic. What exactly do you propose we do? Hack into the routers or whatever at the ends of these cables? That pretty obviously won’t work. The ISPs are going to notice that they are sending out 2x the data that they are getting in.
It’s possible, sure. If that is what people have been talking about then I concede I misunderheard…I thought we were talking about tapping into the regular voice, data and video that is running across.
You could have some kind of secure point to point link from some secure government facility to the ISP who owns that link, then use basically secure, out of band fiber across to another secure link at the other end and to where the destination would be. You’d need to have secure facilities at both end points (and I guess the facilities at the nation state in question would need to be secure)…and I’m not seeing why anyone would bother as there are better ways to get secure traffic across a link…but yeah, it’s possible.
Thing is…if you WERE going to tap those links you’d be faced with some god awful encryption if we are talking about that kind of traffic. And you wouldn’t be getting that traffic in real time. It would be like that link we tapped during the cold war between (IIRC) a Russian naval base in the Pacific and their communications hub.
But ok…yeah, if that is what we are talking about then you couldn’t simply parse the traffic at the ISP (voice, video, data), you’d need to tap the link to get it…or you’d need to figure out how to hack or other wise compromise the secure routers at the head end of the cable.
-XT
If you want to capture the entire cable’s traffic then tapping it wouldn’t work either. I thought that would be obvious from my (multiple) explanations earlier.
If you want to get everything then you are probably out of luck…you can’t do it. You can’t tap the cable and get it all because you have the same exact problem…there is simply no way to get the traffic back to anywhere you could process it. Not unless you are talking about building a secret base where the tap is (and powering it by a volcano…with sharks with frickin lasers on their heads to guard it). satellite uplinks wouldn’t handle that much traffic (or they would be…and it would be kind of obvious if you built a satellite uplink dish in the ocean near the breaks at any rate). Radio is the same (same problems with bandwidth and with the whole big radio dish thingy). Microwave same same. I suppose you COULD build another big fiber cable and run that back to your secret base…but it would be kind of obvious as well.
I concede that I hadn’t thought of Sam’s scenario…if we are talking about some kind of out of band secure traffic from some country sneaking traffic across then THAT is a possible reason to tap. Then you aren’t going to overwhelm the system, and time wouldn’t perhaps be that critical (you’d have to decrypt it anyway). But if we are talking about getting it all…that ain’t happening no matter how you slice the cable.
-XT
I’ll add to your batshit scenarios that Super Tuesday is tomorrow, and stirring up some national security futz would benefit a national security candidate. Which would be slightly persuasive if the press were doing more than minimal (if that) coverage of the cable cuts.
Why couldn’t the U.S. have covertly laid cables going to secure processing facilities in Britain? Again, I don’t really understand your objections. We’ve been listening in on traffic over copper lines in the Mediterranean for two decades now. The only difference between that and fiber optic cable is that you have to cut the optic cable to get access to the data.
I am absolutely certain that there is an undersea war going on with submarines.
Are you talking about cables between the US and Britain (which I’m certain we DO have) or cables between where these breaks are and Britain??
Well, a couple of things. First off, copper has a lot less bandwidth than fiber trunk line. Secondly listening in is different than capturing all the data. Third, the technology has gotten a LOT better in those two decades. Again, it’s like asking why someone in the 30’s isn’t using a buggy whip anymore when a couple of decades before people were.
Bit more of a difference than that I’d say.
-XT
I mean that we could have plunked a splitter on the ocean floor and sent the intercepted data on a cable to England to a secure processing facility. In other words, your objection that we can’t send the data anywhere is bupkis. Fiber optic cable isn’t that expensive to lay, and it’s well within the capabilities of the U.S. intelligence agencies to lay their own cable. For all we know there is a new fiber optic cable running from the ME to NSA’s headquarters in Washington.
(1) So what? We aren’t using 80s technology to process the data. Computers have gotten faster, hard drives have gotten bigger, and we have our own fiber optic cables. The scale is greater, but there is no fundamental reason we can’t use optic cables like we used copper, except for the fact that you need to break the optic cable to tap it.
(2) I don’t see the difference.
(3) Technology to do what?
I really don’t understand why you think this is impossible. The U.S. monitors all international traffic that passes through its network. Its not going to be that much more difficult to monitor traffic over these cables.
Well, if we are going to speculate on a fantasy secret cable running from the ME to the UK or the US, again, why do we need a tap? I mean, if we could run a secret cable why not patch it in BEFORE the cable? Why go to all the trouble to splice a cable under the ocean if you already have those top secret big pipes running back to your processing facilities?
Thing is, it isn’t MY explanation that’s ‘bupkis’ here. You’d need to first off provide some kind of data saying we DO have those big pipes running back to the US that afaik absolutely no one knows about. Then you’d need to show how it would even be possible to splice in not one, not two, not three but four major trunk lines to pipes running thousands of miles back to the UK or the US without anyone seeing that. How would you even do such a thing?
This leaves aside things like as the maximum distance for fiber and such small things like that…though I suppose if we are going to speculate about a cable run that long it would be trivial to put in relays to. Piece of cake.
Well, again, if we are going to speculate about a secret fiber trunk line from the ME to the US/UK then I suppose the only technical challenges (heh!) would be how you were going to splice all that fiber from 4 different TRUNK lines into your fantasy cable back to the processing centers. Without anyone seeing it.
Seriously…I would be less surprised if we really WERE using advanced alien technology to do this than the tale you are spinning here.
Yes…I noticed. It is painfully obvious you don’t see the difference.
It’s not impossible. You COULD do all of the things you are speculating on…it would just cost more money than I can even estimate, would be technically challenging in the extreme, and I frankly doubt you could do it without someone catching on.
And it’s totally unnecessary.
Yes they do. All the time. For years and years. And by and large they do it the way I speculated. They don’t use physical taps on the trunk lines.
Well, except for all the improbable secret cables, splicing multiple trunk lines in the ocean and the fact that they use upper layer protocols, sniffing, traffic capturing and expert systems to do real time traffic analysis and hacking to do it today instead of attempting to tap those big fat pipes. Other than all that stuff you are right…it’s just the same.
-XT