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If this sort of stuff interets you, I highly recommend the book "Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage". [0] It tells the story of
by Jerry2 10y ago
If this sort of stuff interets you, I highly recommend the book "Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage". [0] It tells the story of Cold War espionage from the submarine warfare point of view. The book also covers "Operation Ivy Bells" which was a joint Navy/CIA/NSA mission whose objective was to place wire taps on Soviet underwater communication lines during the Cold War. [1] Sub placed a listening and recording devices over Soviet cables and was able to capture their communications. The device was fairly large as can be seen from this picture [2]. I'm sure they're smaller now.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Man%27s_Bluff:_The_Untold_Story_of_American_Submarine_Espionage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Man%27s_Bluff:_The_Untol...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Ivy_Bells
[2] http://www.therebreathersite.nl/11_Closed%20Circuit%20Rebreathers/images/GE%20MK10/UnderseaEspionage.jpg http://www.therebreathersite.nl/11_Closed%20Circuit%20Rebrea...
- sandworm101 10y ago>>> I'm sure they're smaller now. I'm betting not. Ivy Bells was back in the days of copper wires being tapped by external sensors placed atop undersea cables. Today's undersea cables are optical. You'd need to splice in, or at least open up a cable to get at the individual fibers to install similar taps. I cannot see how that would be done in the pressurized world of submarines. Normal procedure for such work involves hauling the cable to a surface ship where it can be picked apart by hand. A sub would have to somehow pull the cable inside its pressure hull, a very dangerous task. Any sub equipped for such an operation would surely be noticed (massive doors, reconfigured interior spaces, special station-keeping thrusters etc). Maybe they do it in very shallow water, but then you would still need a dry environment. You would have to deal with the current passing through the cable, somehow without detection or cooperation from the cable's operators. There are just too many difficulties to make splicing-by-submarine practical.
- jonknee 10y agoI wouldn't count it out, but obviously all the specifics are highly classified. The USS Jimmy Carter is the sub (or one of?) we probably use for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter It is 100' longer than other subs in the same class thanks to special equipment "which allows launch and recovery of ROVs and Navy SEAL forces".
- ju-st 10y agoWikipedia even references to multiple sources: "Intelligence experts speculate that the MMP may find use in similar missions as an underwater splicing chamber for Optical fiber cables.[7][8][9][10]"
- sandworm101 10y agoNo doubt people have discussed the concept. If I were a navy looking for funding, or just another use for an existing sub, I would definitely propose it. But I don't see the practicality of going through all that effort for rather limited gain. If this is an enemy cable, it will be encrypted. If it is a privately-owned cable (internet) then it can more easily be tapped on land or via a standard ship. I suspect that even an enemy cable, if it is in public waters, could be spliced far more effectively by a surface ship. Once the tap is in place, how do you get the information from the tap back to HQ? The sub won't have the manpower and computers needed to gain meaningful intel from such a cable. Getting the data back to shore would require either another cable or an in situ recording device a la ivy bells. Recording devices would both delay any data by weeks/months and limit the ability to insert data, an essential task when attacking encrypted connections.
- pests 10y agoWhy another cable? You would have one right in front of you. Loop back the splice into another fiber in the same cable toy have access to.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Jerry2 10y ago>Today's undersea cables are optical. You'd need to splice in, or at least open up a cable to get at the individual fibers to install similar taps. I cannot see how that would be done in the pressurized world of submarines. That's an excellent point but I think they have a way to lift the cable off the seabed and make a splice even though it's hard. NSA are masters of making the impossible work. What I can't figure out is how they collect the data. These optical cables carry tens of terabits of data per second so how do you store & transmit it back for analysis? I'm guessing they filter some of it but you still end up with lots of bits.
- coldtea 10y ago>NSA are masters of making the impossible work. Citation needed. And not Hollywood movies.
- Spooky23 10y agoIt's been well documented that as far back as 1971, the NSA & Navy was tapping cables under the Sea of Okhotsk. Sounds pretty impossible to me.
- gscott 10y agoI believe the data goes through some friendly countries where we can get to it easier.
- Jerry2 10y agoDo you think they lay another cable from the tap to some collection point or do they use radio waves? Or maybe they just record the data and then just collect it by a surface ship or a sub every month...
- seanp2k2 10y agoRadios don't work so well underwater. This is why subs have various radio masts that poke above the surface. They stay just below the water with the antennas dry for the most part. It's be much easier to mess with routing (in secret or not) and capture data at another point.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoI wouldn't put it beyond the capabilities of a nation state to tap fiber by putting a kink in it and processing the light that leaks out.
- chinathrow 10y agoHence the name PRISM.
- uxp 10y agoPRISM is just a frontend to a database. If I was to build a queryable database, I'd grab something like Lucene, and stick that on top of something like Postgres. The next step would be to build an interface so my non-technical business partners don't have to write SQL or some other query and manually send that to the server, but instead can ask stupid questions like "how long are Trumps fingers" and get results. That last part is PRISM.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jloughry 10y agoNon-invasive fibre optic tap technology has been commercially available since at least the early 1990s. I recall seeing ads for a hand-held device at that time. By carefully bending the fibre over a mandrel, a small amount of light can be made to leak out through the cladding past the angle of total internal reflection. No need to cut and splice the fibre. The ads implied the device worked on jacketed fibres; I suppose that depends on the transparency of the jacket to 1064nm IR radiation.
- tomkinstinch 10y agoBending isn't required, and the transparency of the jacket doesn't matter if it's thin enough. The term to Google is "evanescent wave coupling."
- 10y ago
- jameshart 10y agoAvoiding detection seems simple - just engineer a plausibly-deniable break in the cable some distance away from the place where you're working on the splice - a fishing trawler dragging the cable would do. Then before the cable operator can fix the break, you splice your tap into the inoperable cable.
- Filligree 10y agoIt's possible to find the approximate location of a break by looking at its influence on reflections. A double break, as you're suggesting, would eventually be noticed. (If that wasn't possible, then repairing cable breaks would be insanely expensive.)
- mirimir 10y agoRight. And if the US has been doing this for a decade or more, you'd think that at least one of the taps would have been discovered.
- tw04 10y agoDiscovered by who? I'm pretty sure the CIA/NSA will just "disappear" anyone who tries to report the anomaly.
- knowaveragejoe 10y agoYou're pretty sure?
- tw04 10y agoLet me rephrase that: I'm positive the CIA has in the past and will continue to make people disappear. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_site
- knowaveragejoe 10y ago
- bind 10y ago> where it can be picked apart by hand Could it be picked apart by a robot?
- widforss 10y agoWhy not just tap at the repeaters? The signal has to be electrical there, and you can probably make it so that maintainance teams don't notice the tap.
- The_Fox 10y agoTurns out it doesn't need to be electrical- see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_amplifier.
- Nursie 10y agoRemember about 10 years ago when a whole bunch of.middle eastern optical links went down, temporarily, a few days apart? Due to a strangely coordinated set of accidents with boat anchors? Something's going on
- velox_io 10y agoYes, and how nothing was mentioned in mainstream media.
- kevin_thibedeau 10y agoA tangential story mentioned in Simon Singh's 'Code' (excellent read) is that a mole was caught sending secrets to the Soviets based on intel from the taps. They didn't want to tip the Russians off though so he was never prosecuted. Instead they fed him with phony documents to keep the taps secret.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoA similar plot point occurs in The Imitation Game, the Turing biopic that was released last year or so.
- stygiansonic 10y agoBritain had an entire program during WWII designed to identify, capture and turn German agents to get them to feed disinformation to their superiors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-Cross_System It was used in a clever manner to subtly suggest to the Germans an incorrect location (Pas-de-Calais) for D-Day. WWII produced some of the most interesting (now publicly known) espionage operations. My favourite is Operation Mincemeat: https://www.damninteresting.com/mincemeat-and-the-imaginary-man/ https://www.damninteresting.com/mincemeat-and-the-imaginary-...
- vacri 10y agoAnother way the Allies misdirected the D-Day landing sites was to do a lot of reconnaissance flights to the southern coast of Bretagne (northern bit of the west coast of France). Of course, a lot these recce flights also 'just happened' to also overfly the actual location of the D-Day landings...