[QUOTE=xtisme]
I’ve answered this a number of times in a number of different ways. Let me try a different tact here because it’s obvious what I’ve said before in this thread isn’t making an impression. Let me ask you…how do you suppose the traffic gets on those optical links? Where does the traffic come from? Where does it originate?
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I assume there are routers at both ends of the undersea cable. Traffic comes into one router, its sent across the cable, and the other router sends it on its merry way to wherever. What I think your proposing to do is to somehow remotely hack into these routers so that you can view the traffic. I think this is unlikely because you will be easily detected at the scale I would imagine the NSA is operating at.
For example, lets say that someone sends a packet from a computer in Egypt to a computer in France. That packet will go through a few routers until it gets to the one on the Egypt side of the undersea cable. It will then be sent to the European side of that cable. There is a router at that end of the cable, who sends it to a few routers until it reaches its destination in France. What I think your proposing is that the NSA has hacked into the router on the European side of the undersea cable. If a packet they want hits the European router, a copy of that packet is sent to the NSA. I would imagine they can do that.
The problem is when you start grabbing a significant portion of that traffic. Lets say that there is 10 gb/s of traffic on the cable, and that NSA wants 25% of the packets going through the cable. The router on the European side is going to see 10 gb/s worth of packets coming in, but its going to be sending out 12.5 gb/s worth of packets due to duplication. I don’t see how that could go on undetected.
[QUOTE=xtisme]
That is not how an optical repeater works, no. An optical repeater takes the signal and amplifies it (basically reforms the wave, reshapes it, corrects timing errors and then retransmit the cleaned up signal). You are talking about something like an optical to electric (digital) transceiver I expect.
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Doing a bit more research there appears to be two classes of optical repeaters. One is an optical-electrical system. These work in the manner I described. They are basically an optical receiver and transmitter rolled into one. The way information travels from the receiver to the transmitter would be by electricity.
The other class, which according to Wikipedia, is replacing the electro-optical systems are contraptions I don’t fully understand. I don’t know what system the cables that were cut used, but if its an electro-optical system I think it would be easy to capture the signal in the manner I described. The exclusively optical amplifies would be more difficult, but I don’t know enough about the technology to say whether they are feasible.
[QUOTE=xtisme]
I’m unsure where you are going with this. If you WERE going to splice the optical cable why would you want to convert from optical to copper (which is what I presume you are talking about) and then back to optical? If you could put in your traffic splitter at all on the bottom of the ocean I don’t see why you wouldn’t keep it the same layer one protocol…why complicate things more than they already are?
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No, the way I thought the repeaters worked involved converting the optical signal to an electric one. Once you have something as a digital electric signal its easy to copy.
[QUOTE=xtisme]
It isn’t one contiguous cable IIRC but multiple hops. It was also done over years and completely in the open…and it cost half a billion dollars. I said it was theoretically possible to run your phantom link…I just think it is unlikely in the extreme to do so covertly. They would have had to have a cable laying submarine and a bunch of other stuff I can’t even think about…and covert maintenance on it would be a stone cold bitch.
Use your own Occam’s Razor but your scenario is pretty far fetched.
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It wouldn’t have to be a submarine doing the work. Stick a cable laying ship in the middle of a carrier group, or something similar, and send them on their way. As I’ve noted before, we have done something like this before. We tapped the copper wires in the Mediterranean. There had to have been a covert system to get the information to where it could be processed. I don’t see why a fiber optic system would pose any greater difficulty.
[QUOTE=xtisme]
I’m dismissing this because it is unlikely in the extreme. COULD the CIA do something like this? Theoretically I’d have to say with all honestly…maybe. I just don’t know enough about covert ways of doing major construction and engineering. I know (sort of) what it would take to attempt such a thing in the open with everyone aware of it…and it would be VERY challenging. Covertly without anyone figuring it out? I don’t think so.
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I freely admit we are getting into tin foil hat territory here. However, I have just as hard of a time accepting that it’s just a giant coincidence that all of these cables went down by accident as I do that it was done intentionally. As to why the want to, well, they want to do it for the same reason they wanted the information going over the copper wires. Intelligence.
[QUOTE=xtisme]
It wouldn’t be worth the money. Why do you think the CIA/NSA wants to or has the desire (or capabilities) to look at every bit of traffic flowing across those links? How would they process it all so that it would actually be useful? Even assuming for a moment that they COULD get all that traffic back (which I am highly skeptical of) what would they do with it? Do you have any idea how much data is flowing across each of those links every second??
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I’m sure it’s a lot, but you have to look at every bit of data to get at the stuff you want. Not very closely, of course. I’d imagine the data size would get pared down pretty quickly. If it were me running it, I’d toss all of the video, imagine, and sound files, and focus on the e-mails.
[QUOTE=xtisme]
Yes, they are. But those links aren’t contiguous point to point links. They are going through multiple ISP’s linking multiple sites. They are also doing it out in the open with commercial equipment. They have no requirement to do it under the sea AND covertly so no one can detect it. They are also not attempting to cut into an existing cable plant, splice it and attempt to capture routed traffic and send it back to Washington.
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It looks to me that they are going entirely across the pacific ocean underwater. It specifies landings in Taiwan, and S. Korea, so I would expect them to mention any other ones as well.
[QUOTE=xtisme]
It’s definitely not ‘Easily doable’…by any stretch of the imagination. Just putting in a regular fiber optic cable at sea is a challenge…without all the other stuff.
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Maybe I am underestimating the difficulty, but I don’t see why it’s that hard. Cable laying ships are basically specialized cargo ships. Getting into the Mediterranean would be difficult, but as I’ve said a few times now, we managed to get the data off of copper cables. I don’t see any special reason why the data on a fiber optic cable would be that much harder to transmit out.
[QUOTE=xtisme]
You don’t need to capture every frame/cell of data. If you did do that it would overwhelm any system…especially since a lot of that data will be encrypted in one form or another. So…it’s unnecessary if your goal is to capture more interesting traffic than some guy buying porn in Bangkok or sending email to his mother in Hong Kong.
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How are you supposed to determine if a frame of data is a guy looking at porn or someone planning an attack without looking at that data?
[QUOTE=xtisme]
As far as the problem…look at your scenario for gods sake! You are talking about running covert cables from the ME to DC or London man! And splicing FO trunk lines (with thousands of fiber pairs) AT SEA…COVERTLY! In light of that you think it would be a challenge to hack some ISP’s upper layer switching system? KIDS hacked the PENTAGON’S computer network (well, part of it)…and you think the US government can’t hack some telco’s system?? Believe me…if I had a billion dollars to spend on it I could hack any system not completely isolated in the world. Zero perspiration if we are talking about those kinds of dollars. And at a billion dollars it would be a bargain compared to what your effort would cost.
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But we’ve already done it for copper cables. The only meaningful difference between copper cables and fiber optics is the volume of data, and the fact that you can’t just slap an inductive loop on the fiber optics.
[QUOTE=xtisme]
I seriously doubt the US government needs the US telco’s assistance to hack their systems or sniff their traffic. I don’t have either and I routinely sniff the traffic on Comcasts network (who I happen to be hooked up to at home). And I don’t have billions of dollars of budget a year (would that I did).
-XT
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You can sniff a tiny fraction of their network. I think they are going to notice if you start sniffing every single packet of data that goes across their network. My understanding of sniffing is that a sniffer simply looks at the data traveling through it’s connection. If you wanted to sniff all of Comcast’s traffic, that means all of Comcast’s traffic would have to pass through a computer you control. That requires you to route every packet on their network through your computer, or somehow take control of one of their central computers. Neither of which I think could happen undetected on a large scale.
