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NSA Tapping Underwater Fiber Optics
An anonymous reader submitted an interesting story about the NSA
splicing fiber optics under water in order to eavesdrop on digital traffic. This happened years ago, so who knows what they're doing today. Not surprisingly, apparently actually getting the tap is relatively easy. Sifting through the zillions of bits and finding something useful is a little trickier.
All one would have to crack into would be the repeater amplifiers that are placed probably every 160km in the cable. A college EE grad could design a sniffer that wouldn't incur a voltage drop or induce noise in the amplifiers. Done this way, the actual fiber strands wouldn't even be touched. It's anybody's guess how they get the resulting data out, but it's probably by wireless transmission, perhaps with a small subsurface bouy and a Naval patrol assignment.
Dear lord, it sounds to me like the NSA is some sort of spy agency! Does the United States government know about this?
--
"Don't trolls get tired?"
The US Navy is still doing this. At the end of Blind Man's Bluff - upstairs somewhere, the author talks about the fact that a couple (2-3) Navy subs that have been specially modified with diving chambers keep getting Presidental Unit Citations for classified missions, every year. Since the Subs that first tapped these lines were specially modified and got PUCs for classified missions...the author suspects it's still going on.
I think the Navy also did it in the Barrets Sea to the north of Murmansk as well.
It's really interesting how the Navy thought to tap into cable. A Navy Officer remebered boating with his dad on the Mississippi and seeing signs that marked cable runs under water, so he talked head of Naval Operations into sending subs in to see if the Russians had the same sort of signs. They did and the rest is history.
Carefully remove the shield on the optical fibre and put a light detecting device to read the traffic.
The very thing that makes fiber work (Total Internal Reflection (Refraction? I can never keep it straight)) prevents you from doing this. In order to see the light you must make some of it escape by bending the fiber such that some of the light escapes but not all of it, or else the remote end will detect the loss of signal.
Even with the fiber bent the remote end will see some loss of signal but should compensate without problem. Now if I were the NSA I'd make sure I could get away with very little bending so that hardly any loss would be detected, and simply rely on my advanced hardware to boost a very weak signal.
Now, I suppose, we *really* know why governments around the world want to eradicate music-swapping and "indecent" Internet imagery - they can't monitor what we're really up to through all the noise :)
Of course, you can take anything said in public about intelligence activities with several grains of salt. If the NSA *can* successfully and selectively monitor undersea cable traffic, they're not going to be so silly as to broadcast that fact to the world.
Go you big red fire engine!
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
A modern fiber optic cable is probably using Erbium doped fiber amplifiers. These do not convert the light back into electrical signals. They directly amplify the light.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Assume that everyone uses PGP for their email, and that it is impractical for the NSA to crack PGP encrypted messages. The NSA will still want to tap every data communications link that they can get access to. The reason is traffic analysis. You can get a lot of useful information by analyzing the source, destination and volume of messages. This is already a common intelligence gathering and criminal investigation technique when applied to call logs from telephone switching systems.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
The reason for the high voltage running through the line is to power repeaters every 100 miles or so. Why not just tap into one of the repeaters, which convert the optical signal into electronic signals and then back again? Sounds pretty easy to me, given the right equipment. As for sorting the data the repeater is able to deal with it as is the router or whatever is on the receiving end so why wouldnt whatever technology the nsa has. The problem would be storage.
maken
Any data carrying signal must include a range of wavelengths
Fiber optics with current technology transmit all the data on a single optical wavelength. The technology to do multiple wavelengths has been in development for a while, but we haven't hit serious barriers with a single wavelength, so this technology hasn't been commercialized.
And the rate at which a light is pulsed doesn't affect its propogation rate. That would violate all sorts of laws of physics.
The real reason why you must do the electrical conversion and back is that several sources combine to cause slight variations in the time bits of light take to get from one end of the fiber to the next. Chaos and imperfections in the glass effectively blur the time dimension of the signal at the output end, so you must clean the signal periodically.
This has nothing to do with the fact that different wavelengths of light travel at different speeds through matter. That causes chromatic aberation in lenses, which is one of the reasons why big telescopes use only mirrors. But since there is on a single color of light going through the fiber, there cannot be any chromatic aberration.
-Matt
-Cheetah
Word to the wise, encrypt your critical traffic since a good deal of internet communications is vulnerable to being intercepted at NAPs (Network Access Points) as well at other major connection points. Private peering arrangements routed outside of NAP (ie. MAE-East, MAE-West, etc) facilities can reduce risk in some instances, but typically can't eliminate all risk since the majority of internet traffic travels through at least one major NAP; and the exact connections, etc are often unknown to all parties, even to the people who operate the NAP facilities.
:-)
In closing, governments, etc are typically years ahead of the media and common-knowledge in regards to intellegence gathering. NAP tapping is never mentioned in the media, but I'm sure it's happening. Be forewarned
I never condoned anything, I simply stated the two jobs of the NSA.
That said, deriding someone for thinking it okay to invade privacy for their own benefit while criticising socialism is kind of ironic. In a market economy (hint: the opposite of socialism) the only reason to do ANYTHING is for your own benefit. That's the whole point -- if I can tap into a transoceanic cable and make it profitable, the free market says I should be able to.
You apparently think I should not be able to (presumably by the use of police force or such to stop me?). Communist...
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Isn't it ironic that the NSA stands for the very thing thay, behind our backs and behind the scenes, they attempt, and perhaps succeed, to invade?
The NSA has two jobs -- one is to breach foreign information security, but their other is to keep US information secure. So it isn't ironic -- they just have to know security from both sides.
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Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Not even the NSA can tap fiberoptics inductively - laws of physics and all that. They would have to splice it, a much more difficult thing to do at the bottom of the ocean.
If a fiberoptic tap has really occurred - and as far as I can tell, the evidence is simply from unnamed sources according to ZDNet - it would be a very different animal from the Okhotsk tap. Okhotsk used high-capacity recorders to store the info for later retrieval by submarine. That would have been analog data. You couldn't save enough digital fiberoptic data in a recording pod to make it worthwhile. You'd have to drop a Cray on the seafloor to process some of the data in realtime and save only what you're interested in.
That's an operation for a l33t hax0r somewhere - hack into the NSA Cray that's sitting on the ocean bed somewhere off the Kamchatka pensinsula...
All the NSA would have to do would be arrange for a fishing boat to snag the cable they were planning to splice, to explain the interruption.
has anyone else wondered how the NSA is shipping the data? wouldn't you need the equivalent of another fibre-optic cable running alongside to transport the data back to virginia?
considering that laying an optical cable is somewhere O(1e9) $ and not trivial to lay undetected, it must be quite a feat...
Because in my MCSE stydy guide, Networking Essentials, it sais that Fiber Optics are impossible to tap.
So there.
The use of an OTDR can find irregularities that woudl be cause by splices. If the cable companies do scans routinely for differentials against baseline (for preventative maintenance), the splices by No Such Agency will show up.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
Ten years ago, it took $20,000 worth of a van full of electronics. Now it probably only takes $5,000 and a suitcase. Of course, the problem with the van thing was that most people don't want their fiber optic cables tapped. It's just a thing with them -- a phase they're going through. They'll get over it.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
According to economic theory, you should be able jack up interest rates, throw millions of people out of work, and within a year the economy will recover, but resume at a much lower inflation rate. As it turns out, Ronnie was right. But try explaining that to the people at the beginning of the recession who lost their jobs.
Actually, you have no choice once you start inflating your currency. It's recession now or depression later. Look at Turkey. The Turkish Lire is now 1,110,500 to the dollar. It was only 580,000 to the dollar when I was there a year ago. Eventually they'll be hauling lire around in wheelbarrows because they're so worthless.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
"I'm not going to sit here and dissuade you from your views" - Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden
"Oh, Kent, I'd be lying if I said my men weren't committing crimes"- Homer J. Simpson
It isn't known whether the cable's operator detected the intrusion, though former NSA officials say they believe it went unnoticed.
When I was a freshman in college and had to take a class on telecommunications we had an engineer from Southwestern Bell come out and explain these new fangled fiber optics. One of the claims he made was that they would be nigh-impossible to tap because the splice could be detected at either end rather easily due to latency issues.
So my question is this: Anyone have any ideas how the heck they might have done this? Whatever the device was, it seems it'd have to be very, very fast at whatever it does. The only thing I can imagine is some sort of intelligent lens that reads signals while they pass through it.
Scary, whatever it is.
- Rev.So they're going to build a room to drop to the bottom of the ocean, splice a cable, and then hold a computer cluster to process the data? Unless they are interested in very targetted ip's or other easily sorted packets, it'll be huge and costly. Anything interesting will probably be encrypted anyway, so they have to add a couple orders of magnitude of computer power for that.
Or maybe they are going to run their own fiber bundle back to dry land? Govornment agencies don't have quite that kind of budget.
Even if they can get reasonable results right now, Bandwidth usage is growing faster than processing power. They won't be able to keep up for much longer. And then eventually they will be caught, causing all the cable companies to search their entire lines for more taps, pissing off innumerable foreign countries.
The spy business ain't what it used to be.
This must be expensive, having to upgrade their equipment at the bottom of the ocean whenever a new generation of transmitter/receiver/multiplexer comes out...
Unfortunately, the entire budget of the program was wasted due to my rentng a house that possesses $39.49 of cheap but aluminum-foil-backed cellulose insulation, which does little to keep heat out or in but blocked the final link in the chain.
As well as anyone else trying to call me on the cellphone while I'm in the house.
Good thing the Ex-Soviet Union didn't have the tech, apparently, or the NSA would have then found their own monitoring cable tapped, and have to install another tap and cable on the USSR's return cable, which would then be tapped by the Reds, and so on, and so on...
The Wall Street Journal just ran this something similar.. (haven't checked the zdnet doc lagging on dl's) [mirror]
Anyways I doubt its impossible for the NSA to splice it, however when companies take the corrective measures to ensure this won't happen what are they going to do...
Example, say a company takes the time, and money to protect their fiber say inside inexpensive pvc pipes or something similar, who does the government expect to blame when a company finds out that 100 miles away from any shoreline, their casing has been breached? Certainly its not Joe Fisherman doing this.
Anyways aside from that nothing is going to help them when that fiber line is carrying IPSec data all the way through the connections, along with messages that have been encrypted before even being sent. So many people have little to worry about.
For those interested in Crypto Equipment and such (especially those working in the ISP segments) you can check out the Crypto Equipment Guide. Hopefully many companies will start looking at their clients (whether their employees, subscribers, etc.) more serious. I know Earthlink is taking that approach.
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Submarine cable interception
Submarine cables now play a dominant role in international telecommunications, since - in contrast to the limited bandwidth available for space systems - optical media offer seemingly unlimited capacity. Save where cables terminate in countries where telecommunications operators provide Comint access (such as the UK and the US), submarine cables appear intrinsically secure because of the nature of the ocean environment. 49. In October 1971, this security was shown not to exist. A US submarine, Halibut, visited the Sea of Okhotsk off the eastern USSR and recorded communications passing on a military cable to the Khamchatka Peninsula Halibut was equipped with a deep diving chamber, fully in view on the submarine's stern. The chamber was described by the US Navy as a "deep submergence rescue vehicle". The truth was that the "rescue vehicle" was welded immovably to the submarine. Once submerged, deep-sea divers exited the submarine and wrapped tapping coils around the cable. Having proven the principle, USS Halibut returned in 1972 and laid a high capacity recording pod next to the cable. The technique involved no physical damage and was unlikely to have been readily detectable.
The Okhotsk cable tapping operation continued for ten years, involving routine trips by three different specially equipped submarines to collect old pods and lay new ones; sometimes, more than one pod at a time. New targets were added in 1979. That summer, a newly converted submarine called USS Parche travelled from San Francisco under the North Pole to the Barents Sea, and laid a new cable tap near Murmansk. Its crew received a presidential citation for their achievement. The Okhotsk cable tap ended in 1982, after its location was compromised by a former NSA employee who sold information about the tap, codenamed IVY BELLS, to the Soviet Union. One of the IVY BELLS pods is now on display in the Moscow museum of the former KGB. The cable tap in the Barents Sea continued in operation, undetected, until tapping stopped in 1992.
During 1985, cable-tapping operations were extended into the Mediterranean, to intercept cables linking Europe to West Africa. (30) After the cold war ended, the USS Parche was refitted with an extended section to accommodate larger cable tapping equipment and pods. Cable taps could be laid by remote control, using drones. USS Parche continues in operation to the present day, but the precise targets of its missions remain unknown. The Clinton administration evidently places high value on its achievements, Every year from 1994 to 1997, the submarine crew has been highly commended.(31) Likely targets may include the Middle East, Mediterranean, eastern Asia, and South America. The United States is the only naval power known to have deployed deep-sea technology for this purpose.
Miniaturised inductive taps recorders have also been used to intercept underground cables.(32) Optical fibre cables, however, do not leak radio frequency signals and cannot be tapped using inductive loops. NSA and other Comint agencies have spent a great deal of money on research into tapping optical fibres, reportedly with little success. But long distance optical fibre cables are not invulnerable. The key means of access is by tampering with optoelectronic "repeaters" which boost signal levels over long distances. It follows that any submarine cable system using submerged optoelectronic repeaters cannot be considered secure from interception and communications intelligence activity.
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I would be VERY surprised if they don't also have less secret hardware in place on the US ends of these links.
--Mike--
Really? Isn't it ironic that the NSA stands for the very thing thay, behind our backs and behind the scenes, they attempt, and perhaps succeed, to invade? (Hint: What's the S in NSA stand for?)
A little too ironic... And yeah I really do think.
So you're one of those people that condones such invasion of privacy, so long as it is for your benefit. You know, there's an entire political party dedicated to that sort of thing. In America, they call themselves Democrats, though they are certainly not the Democratic Party that I have read about in my history books. Oh no, their ideals are far from their origins, so much so that they resemble the Communist or Socialist Parties of Europe and Asia far more than the Democratic ideals for which the party was initially founded.
One should also consider the Ninth Amendment, or, as I call it, the "elastic clause for the people". It essentially guarantees certain rights beyond those specifically named in the Constitution to protect the people from intrusion and tyranny. While these rights may not simply be assumed, they are protected, and the prevailing code of morality generally decides which rights are protected and which rights are not.
While I am at it, perhaps we should take a peak at the Eighth Amendment as well, which provides that no one shall be subject to cruel or unusual punishment for a crime. Take, for instance, the high school honors graduate that was arrested and will not graduate with her class simply because she had a butter knife in her vehicle at school. Not a butcher's knife. Not a steak knife. A butter knife. She has never shown any violent tendencies, nor has anyone ever reached into a random vehicle for an ordinary household object to threaten the safety of other students. Is it just me, or is "Zero Tolerance" inciting brainless reaction to nothing? Way to go, America.
- An anonymous reader submitted an interesting story about the NSA splicing fiber optics under water in order to eavesdrop on digital traffic
Anonymous, eh? Anyone got any conspiracy theories?I/O Error G-17: Aborting Installation
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There were two taps: one in the Okhotsk Sea (in the Pacific), and one in the Barents Sea (north of Scandinavia). The traitor only gave away the Okhotsk Sea tap.
(source, for those who are interested, is Blind Man's Bluff by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew, a truly excellent book about undersea espionage during the Cold War).
Ray
and found that it was all pr0n.
Mode (3) smart-aleck mode. Press * to return to main menu.
yes, but have you ever seen the amount of equipment needed to do this? At FermiLab, the first stage of data processing is done in the detector circuitry, and occupies a good chunk of the detector's volume (a three story high by 50 meter long piece of equipment, I should mention). Then, an entire floor of a good sized building is filled with racks of mostly custom-built circuitry processes the output of the first stage filters for interesting events.
It's even worse at CERN. They're currently putting up a new building that will be entirely filled with computing hardware to manage the data produced by the experiments when LHC comes online.
Anyway, sure, it's possible to filter that sort of data stream. But could you do it on the seabed? No. I'm not even convinced the NSA could afford many such installations. The price tag for the current incarnation of CDF (one of the primary detectors at FermiLab): around $700 million. And that's using cheap grad student labor to build a good chunk of it.
Quantum mechanics: the dreams that stuff is made of.
Thats why NASA landed that Mars probe so well...
--- Can i borrow your Clue-Stick(tm)? I need to go beat a few people with it...
I recently watched a program about the NSA on a cable television station (I don't recall if it was History Channel, Discovery Channel, or TLC). The only NSA computer photos shown were some Cray and SGI Origin PR photos in what looked to be a small machine room. It was mentioned that the NSA currently has 11 acres of supercomputers and disk storage. Another comment suggested that they used up "10 years worth of storage" in only a few months after the datawarehouse was built.
Now I see how Cray turned a profit this past quarter and why EMC^2 is doing so well!
just be be precise, this was done inthe Artic ocean.
NOVA had a show (Submarines, Secrets, and Spies) on it back in Jabuary 1999. See the transcript here
Maybe things have changed, but according to the special it was maybe halfway there when something went wrong:
It was the highest priority and the biggest budget item in the intelligence budget in the late Reagan administration. They spent about a billion dollars on it, and then it all went away, because of one guy, Pelton.
NARRATOR: Ronald Pelton was analyst working for the National Security Agency who was convicted of spying for the KGB. The on-line tap was one of the operations he compromised.
So this looks like old news, and it might not even be accurate.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
But the modern effort has to do with fiber.
Aside with sheer volume of data, they also have this issue:
Dust or seawater in the submerged chamber could ruin an exposed fiber. Making a surreptitious tap of a live cable would also require circumventing the electrical charge--usually around 10,000 volts--which is used to power the devices that keep the speeding light beams strong.
This is know a "technical difficulties"
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Seriously, though, this is a great book: Like a non-fiction version of some of the early Clancy stories such as The Hunt for Red October. Fun stuff.
"Biped! Good cranial development. Evidently considerable human ancestry."
Perfect source of material for Echelon, not Carnivore. Carnivore belongs to the FBI.
With that being said, if they're really tapping underwater transmissions, here are some words that should trip Echelon:
SOMEONE SET UP US THE <BOMB>1!1!
GUN BOMB TERRORIST EVIL KILL ASSASSINATE MORE DEATH METALLICA RIAA MPAA H4x0r 31337 LINUX UNIX RMS OPEN SOURCE
--
...]
Cheers,
corvi42
-- Begin NSA Keyword Spam --
Bomb Cocaine President Nuclear Suitcase Bomb
[... you get the idea
Computer Terrorism, Firewalls, Secure Internet Connections, ISS, Passwords,Encryption, Espionage
-- End NSA Keyword Spam --
There are a thousand forms of subversion, but few can equal the convenience and immediacy of a cream pie -Noel Godin
Haven't we done this in the past? At least the People are sort of aware of it going on this time around. The NSA shouldn't be allowed to operate outside the law, effectively wiretapping the conversations of millions of people at a time without their explicit permission or a court order.
It's a felony punishable by explusion for a student to bring a tape recorder to school to record their teacher's lectures for replay at a later date, because if they don't expressly tell their teacher they are doing so and give them a chance to say no, they are violating federal wiretap laws. Shouldn't the NSA be held to the same standard, or either having to notify the people they are monitoring, or have a court order telling them it is acceptable to do so?
If a government agency suddenly becomes above the law, as the NSA pretty much is, we should be afraid. Monitoring electronic conversations is no more right then monitoring someone's telephone.
Let's all start sending e-mails with words like "C-4", "the President", "bodyguards", "suicide bomb", "PLO", "IRA", "marijuana", and "hijacking" in an effort to flood their computer system with meaningless messages, to force them to stop.
Ohh wait, its been tried before, and failed.
Check out this European Parliament report on COMINT of automated processing for intelligence purposes of intercepted broadband systems. The author, Duncan Campbell, believes that the key means of accessing long distance optical fibre cables is by tampering with optoelectronic "repeaters".
You can download the full study or others on civil liberties directly from the European Parliament STOA site.
1. Research on supercomputing in universities will get grants from the government.
2. When you actually need to use encryption on something, they wont bother decrypting it.
I like meat helmets.
There was one _big_ difference -- they could inductively sense the current in the cable without cutting the casing. To tap optical fibers, you've got to slit all the protective layers until you get to naked glass. Putting the casing back together so it stays watertight at high pressure is going to be difficult. Hence to tap the copper cable, they just had to send out a diver to clamp the inductive coil onto the cable, and nowadays they could just use a robot arm on the sub; for the fiber optic, you _have_ to bring the cable into a dry work-room.
Gimme a break.
Like the NSA went out and glommed onto a fiber a mile underwater without first reading a book on how fiber telecoms work or testing their equipment in a lab. They knew how much data to expect, and a lousy gigabit SONET line isn't going to slow them down a tenth of a percent.
Other nonsense:
The bit about worrying about high voltage. On a sub. Where the water pressure from a pinhole leak can cut your arm off; where the acid-filled batteries weigh more than the conning tower; where a salsa fart can linger for a month; this guy's worried about a double-shielded power line?
The bit about worrying about being detected. The head ends might see a glitch of a few seconds in a fiber--one dropped call--hold their breath for half a minute waiting for it to happen again, then go back to reading their comic books when it doesn't. If a human even gets involved. If not, then the next day when the intern who refills the printer notices a couple of extra log messages on page 13482, he starts a conspiracy theory involving the Navy, the NSA, and sooper-seekrit spy subs. And the U.S. Intelligence Community would never fan a conspiracy theory (MJ-12), would they?
All this story proves is that the Wall Street Journal is still the same bunch of hack-writing, research-cribbing, blind-quoting, three-day-late reporting losers I told where to shove their overpriced subscription ten years ago.
--Blair
I think it was CNN that did a whole documentry on the story. The ZDNet article seems to leave out one small detail -- a Russian double agent at the NSA gave the project away to the Soviets, and billions of dollars were lost on the project. Cool article though, at least they touched on some technical theories behind it.
If they're successful at this, perhaps they can then help me with my inbox. My friends and coworkers keeping clogging up my mailbox, keeping me from the messages about "Making $5 mil in 30 days working from home on the Internet" and "Sexy Co-eds want you!"
Don't my friends understand that I could extremely wealthy *and* have bodacious nymphs at my side ... if only I could get to reading their messages! *Sigh*