What are you talking about? Where else could you tap into these optic cables, except for where they are?
By modifying a repeater into a splitter. My understanding is that a repeater works by taking an optical signal, converting it to an electric one, and then converting it back to an optical signal at boosted strength. As a picture:
optical signal ----> electrical signal -------> (boosted) optical signal
I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible to have that electric signal drive two optical signals. If I were to tap into an optical cable that’s exactly what I would do. I’d take out one of the repeaters, and insert my own that sends two outputs. One goes on my fiber optic cable to whereever I want it, and the other output gets connected back like it was before. Done right, the only way to detect it would be to pull up the repeater and look at it.
There are cables going from the U.S. to China. cite. That means it’s possible to go from Egypt to the U.S.
Um, ok. I don’t know why you are dismissing this. The CIA has launched satellites and developed the U2 and the Blackbird. I think they can handle laying down 4 fiber optic cables from the ME to the U.S. or England.
How nice of you to insult me instead of explaining what you mean.
This article says they are laying 8,000 miles of fiber optic cable around Africa for 100-200 million. 8,000 miles gets you to Egypt from Washington, with 2,000 miles to spare. That’s 800 million for 4 optic cables, which is about the cost of one spy satellite. Easily doable.
You keep saying this but you still haven’t said how you would get all the data going across these cables without being detected. You’ve given us vague descriptions of hacking, but that has one very serious problem. Whoever controls the router at the end of these cables is going to notice the fact that for every one packet they have coming in through they cable, they are sending out two. One going to it’s intended recipient, and one going to the NSA. I can’t imagine how they would miss that.
Yes, because they have the assistance of the U.S. telecoms. That gives them access to any traffic they want, negating the need to tap the lines.
Id say that Al Q probably uses the internet for its most secure communications , they would have shot themselves in the foot.
For the USA to have done it , then you probably need to posit that some sort of offensive is under way in Iraq and taking out the cables limits the opposition to using cellular and copper signals.
alough it does strike me that this simply could be a new version of piracy, ala we can cut your cables at will , now pay us protection money or else.
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?
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.
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?
I assume they are using ATM as their layer 3 protocol. Leaving aside the difficulty in splicing on the layer 1 side I’m unsure how the VC’s would react. I seriously doubt you could simply put in a repeater and have that work…the traffic wouldn’t route correctly. You’d need to have something that could sniff the traffic at the packet (well, cell if we are talking ATM) level, capture it and then resend it up your theoretical link back to your office for processing.
This is getting beyond my own knowledge at this point so all I can say is I don’t think it would work the way you envision, that it would be a lot more complex…but that I actually don’t know off the top of my head this time.
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.
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.
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??
It wasn’t meant to be an insult. I’m frustrated that I can’t explain this better. Usually I pride myself on being able to explain highly complex and technical subjects at a level anyone can understand. Obviously it’s not working.
[QUOT=treisE]This article says they are laying 8,000 miles of fiber optic cable around Africa for 100-200 million. 8,000 miles gets you to Egypt from Washington, with 2,000 miles to spare. That’s 800 million for 4 optic cables, which is about the cost of one spy satellite. Easily doable.
[/QUOTE]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Had it been the NSA or any of the other alphabet soup agencies , the cables would have gone down individually and be seen as just something that happens all the time, the ships would go out and repair it and none would be the wiser. With so many going down at one time , then it raises red flags all over the world , with everyone assuming that its one of the agencys.
There’s a story on this in Monday’s International Herald Tribune. See here.
For what it’s worth, it says: “Most telecommunications experts and cable operators say that sabotage seems unlikely, but no one knows what damaged the cables or whether the incidents were related.”
But it does not say why they feel sabotage to be unlikely.
Obviously the fact that no war has occurred is entirely the result of tireless efforts by conspiracy activists publicizing these events and forcing the Agencies to retreat into their holes, for now.
Of course we cannot rule out the possibility, nay likelihood of a massive undercover psy-ops incursion in which the major media are complicitly silent.
