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How the NSA taps fiber at the bottom of the oceans
- dfc 13y agoWhere is this from? Google did not turn anything up when I searched for Thomas Gutschker and submarine.
- Achshar 13y agoOP, what is the source? The only source on google is this paste.
- car 13y agoThis was published in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung" this weekend. It's behind a paywall. They make it really hard to find, this is the only link I could come up with: http://fazarchiv.faz.net/?q=menschenrechte+daten&dosearch=new#hitlist http://fazarchiv.faz.net/?q=menschenrechte+daten&dosearch=ne... Original is in german, sorry for the crappy Google translation. Little info on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter EDIT: original article in german: http://pastebin.com/Sy8q4gmT http://pastebin.com/Sy8q4gmT
- nulagrithom 13y agoThis is very poorly written and lacks credibility. Interesting though.
- DrStalker 13y agoIt also doesn't say much except that the submarine can launch a little vehicle that goes down and taps the cables; tapping an already-installed 192 strand fibre cable without breaking any of the strands or disrupting communications would be impressive even even on land and there's no hint as to how the NSA is able to do this once they reach the cable.
- saraid216 13y agoClearly they did it the same way Tony Stark did it at the beginning of The Avengers. They keep the suit in Area 51 next to the Kryptonian scout ship.
- zalzane 13y agoTrying to install a tap on an active fiber cable sounds like a very much impossible feat for any kind of modern technology. If I was the poor EE they laid this problem on, I would have the submarine install the tap while the cable is still being laid, before it's connected to any data streams. Without knowing how long it takes to install the tap, it would also be possible to sabotage cables, install the tap while the cable is down, and make the sabotage out to be the doings of any number of semi-rogue countries in your targeted part of the world.
- elq 13y agohttp://cryptome.org/eyeball/mmp/jimmy-carter.htm http://cryptome.org/eyeball/mmp/jimmy-carter.htm
- buro9 13y agohttp://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/20submarine.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/politics/20submarine.html "The capacity of fiber optics is so much greater than other communications media or technologies, and it's also immune to the stick-up-an-antenna type of eavesdropping," said Jeffrey Richelson, an expert on intelligence technologies. To listen to fiber-optic transmissions, intelligence operatives must physically place a tap somewhere along the route. If the stations that receive and transmit the communications along the lines are on foreign soil or otherwise inaccessible, tapping the line is the only way to eavesdrop on it. The intelligence experts admit there is much that is open to speculation, such as how the information recorded at a fiber-optic tap would get to analysts at the National Security Agency for review.
- car 13y agoThe intelligence experts admit there is much that is open to speculation, such as how the information recorded at a fiber-optic tap would get to analysts at the National Security Agency for review. How about another fiber in the same bundle? Also, during the telco bust, there was a lot of 'dark' (i.e. unlit) fiber, probably prophylactically tapped by NSA.
- stbullard 13y agoThis is a (poor) translation of an article that ran last weekend in the Sunday edition of a German newspaper[1]. It does not appear to contain any new information that was not already publicly available: see, for example, the Wikipedia entry for the USS Jimmy Carter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_(SSN-23) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_(SSN-23) 1. Behind a paywall at http://bit.ly/12cXRi9 http://bit.ly/12cXRi9 ; full original text at http://pastebin.com/KFhVj2X1 http://pastebin.com/KFhVj2X1
- samstave 13y agoAnyone recall the inet cuts to (Egypt?) about two years ago? (Damn, sorry - I just recall how the undersea cables were "cut" and there was a lot of speculation as to who/why... I think we have a culprit. [posting from my phone, ill try to search for a reference when I get to a machine]
- marshray 13y agoIt may take advanced equipment to tap an undersea cable, but not to cut one.
- _djo_ 13y agoI highly doubt it. The NSA has been tapping undersea cables for decades, there's no reason they'd have suddenly become so sloppy as to cut two cables in the same region. Especially as a cable will be inspected if cut and any surveillance equipment will be discovered. I think it's more likely that those outages really were caused by ship anchors.
- dnautics 13y agoit could be a less sophisticated nation's tapping attempt.
- wyck 13y agoAn interesting article from 2001 which discusses this at length. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB990563785151302644.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB990563785151302644.html Alternative link (WSJ one acts wierd) : http://www.zdnet.com/news/spy-agency-taps-into-undersea-cable/115877 http://www.zdnet.com/news/spy-agency-taps-into-undersea-cabl... Also for anyone looking for better reading, the wikipedia page sources (4][5][6][7]) all discuss this topic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_(SSN-23) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Jimmy_Carter_(SSN-23) A video on how Fiber Optic splicing is done by boat is super interesting : http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvlowj_tyco-resolute-mighty-ships-discovery_tech#.UdPEzfndNAs http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvlowj_tyco-resolute-mighty... (45minutes Tycho Resolute). You would think this is a much easier way than building a billion dollar submarine, then again some cables are in delicate waters.
- marshray 13y agoI suspect most cables could be pulled up to a surface ship for tapping, but of course that would give away the position of the tap to satellites.
- car 13y agoAfter reading the WSJ article from 2001, it's become clear that the FAZ/FAS article is largely based on it. Interesting quote from the WSJ article, in light of the fact that it was written 3 months before 9/11: The NSA long boasted some of the most powerful computers on earth. But the agency's technological edge dulled as the equipment aged and money grew tight. The NSA's budget is classified, but individuals familiar with it say it is about two-thirds what it was a decade ago, even before accounting for inflation.
- malandrew 13y agoIs there anyway for the signal to be bulk encrypted in realtime and have the cryptographic key between two end points automatically cycled and exchanged via means other than that cable? I would imagine that making a cryptographically secure wired connection impervious to eavesdropped would be a thing by now.
- charliesome 13y agoIt's already possible for two end points to securely decide on a cryptographic key in a way that's impervious to eavesdropping: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie-Hellman_key_exchange https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie-Hellman_key_exchange
- visarga 13y ago> Is there anyway for the signal to be bulk encrypted in realtime and have the cryptographic key between two end points automatically cycled and exchanged via means other than that cable? They could use one time pads (two identical lists of pregenerated random numbers) at the ends. Then XOR the traffic with those. It's unbreakable. They "key" could be terabytes long.
- jordanthoms 13y agoA terabyte of shared secret would run out in seconds on these links. (and if you reuse it, it's extremely insecure). It's totally possible (but possibly prohibitively expensive) to encrypt the traffic going through a link like this but a OTP is _not_ how you would do it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- anemic 13y agoThere is a book called Blind Man's Bluff that documents how this started during the cold war by NSA tapping soviet undersea communication cables. According to the book one of the captured tapping devices is on display in Moscow and on the side it says "Property of the United States Government". No point in hiding it... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Man%27s_Bluff:_The_Untold_Story_of_American_Submarine_Espionage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_Man%27s_Bluff:_The_Untold...
- visarga 13y agoThe cable operators need to encrypt all traffic going through the fibers - problem solved. In fact what goes through the backbone should be encrypted many times over - by the backbone operator, by the company leasing the backbone bandwidth and by the end user.
- davenull 13y agoThe massive amount of computing power needed to encrypt that much data is hard to buy, unless you are the NSA.
- zimbatm 13y agoTechnologically I was in the impression that the end-points where barely able to route the traffic that's going trough these cables. Encrypting the traffic in real-time might not be possible.
- phire 13y agoNot possible in software, but you can do it in hardware.
- kenrikm 13y agohttp://randomdrake.com/2008/02/13/google-maps-version-of-the-2008-submarine-cable-cuts/ http://randomdrake.com/2008/02/13/google-maps-version-of-the...
- beloch 13y agoUnfortunately, this article includes pretty much everything but how the NSA taps fiber at the bottom of the ocean. I'm actually a bit curious about this myself... If you want to tap a classical signal traveling down a fiber, you want to turn that fiber into a beam splitter. A beam splitter probabilistically reroutes photons from the data stream down a different fiber. Since a single bit traveling down a fiber optic cable is represented by millions of photons in an identical optical state and fiber-optic lines are lossy, a few won't be missed. A 99/1 splitter (i.e. 99% one way, 1% the other) would be pretty hard to detect in a fiber optic line that is subject to fluctuating loss caused by bending, temperature change, etc.. The trick, according to this article, is to avoid cutting the fiber and splicing in a beam splitter. This is because, immediately after the fiber goes dark, the company running it will want to know where the fault is and hook up an OTDR to the line. In the simplest terms possible, this is a device that sends light down the fiber and looks at what gets reflected back. Any break in the fiber will reflect light back the way it came. Time how long the round-trip takes and you can pinpoint where the break is and send out a repair crew. If the operators are fast this can take mere seconds to do. Naturally, the NSA doesn't want repair crews finding their tap-in points! So how do you turn a piece of fiber into a beam-splitter without cutting and splicing? Well, that's surprisingly easy. One way to create a fiber beam splitter is to take two fibers and fusion-combine them. Basically, you put them right next to each other and heat them up so that they melt together just a little bit. If you did this to a line in service it would never have to be cut. This is dead easy to do... to one fiber... in a lab. Doing it to a bundle of fibers in the deep sea is challenging! However, it's certainly feasible. Given that the NSA's budget dwarfs the entire scientific research budget of many nations, it's reasonable to expect they could get pretty good at it given a couple of decades. They probably aren't doing this. I've done a little in free-space optics, but fiber really isn't in my bailiwick. There are probably other, much easier ways. However, based on a few minutes of thought I'm convinced the claims of the article are beyond merely feasible. I'd be shocked if the NSA, and every other nation out there with subs, doesn't have the same capability. The real trick, of course, is getting the data back home (and processing it). The article suggests that the Jimmy Carter has the ability to lay fiber lines, presumably to take their purloined bits back to the nearest NSA processing center. The amplifiers spoken of are unlikely to be used to boost the signal that continues on the original fiber back to the people being spied upon, simply because a good method of tapping in should be indistinguishable from fiber loss, plus components like amplifiers spliced into the line are detectable! No, those amplifiers are likely there to boost the signal going down the NSA's pirate lines. What I don't understand is how the NSA keeps their lines from being detected. Wouldn't, for example, Russia patrol it's fiber back-bones (while tapping other nations fiber) and cut the NSA's lines? There may very well be an underwater struggle going on day-to-day that we're entirely unaware of!
- zimbatm 13y agoSo how does the submarine know where the target traffic is going to be routed ? Unless it's greenland there are many ways your traffic could go: http://submarinecablemap.com/ http://submarinecablemap.com/
- ckozlowski 13y agoI'm a little skeptical about this process given the other, much easier methods available to the NSA. The one thing that isn't discussed here is data retention. Quite simply, how do you get the information to shore, where it can be processed, in a timely fashion? We're talking about thousands of TB or PB (or greater). You can't just simply send that up on a radio link, and a recorder device would have to be enormous. Processing and analysis cannot be realistically done on the submarine, and frequent trips back to the site would tie up a tremendous naval asset. I cannot in any sense see the Navy agreeing to the NSA's continued use of its submarines for tapping civilian traffic when its primary focus lies elsewhere (such as performing special operations in the Pacific.) It's an open secret that the Jimmy Carter was built specifically to tap cables and perform other special missions, but the technical facets of tapping a major transatlantic cable for bulk data collection sounds too unrealistic when better alternatives exist; specifically, the major routing and landing points on US soil where equipment can be installed via cohersion of the owner.
- joosters 13y ago> ... when its primary focus lies elsewhere (such as performing special operations in the Pacific.) But this is its primary focus, and is performing special operations in the Pacific.
- chaz 13y agoThis is my skepticism about these highly technical, complex theories as well. I don't know enough to discount them based on technical merit, and they all certainly sound feasible, however unlikely. It's possible that the NSA can be tapping fibers, running its own fibers back to Utah, storing the data in a massive storage network, running millions of CPUs to decrypt it all, reverse-engineering the ever-changing application protocols, running very deep analysis against the results, and then coming up with the targets' communications patterns. It just seems much easier, cheaper, and faster for them to drop a secret, legal order on the involved companies and let the data come to them. It's the ultimate hack.
- chid 13y agoHow do they transmit and store the intercepted data?
- synthos 13y agoI think everyone is overestimating the complexity here. There a stations underwater that contain optical amplifiers that necessarily boost the signal. A lot of optical amplifiers include monitor ports (splitters) built into the equipment.
- andrewcooke 13y agodo they need to tap fiber? snowden has said that they can hack backbone routers. https://www.google.cl/search?q=snowden+backbone+routers https://www.google.cl/search?q=snowden+backbone+routers
- ihsw 13y agoMaybe they tapped fiber before hacking backbone servers (or vice versa), and they can do both now. Why stop now?
- bkruse 13y agoWhenever this is actually figured out, wall street will beat the NSA to doing it - I am sure of that!