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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.
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.
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
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...
"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
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...
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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Not. Actually its fairly trivial to tap a fiber.
The basic technique once you've dried it off is to remove the cladding on one side and then bend the fiber slightly and place a detector on the outside.
The bend lets a tiny bit of light out, enough to detect, but not enough (hopefully) to tip off the telecoms engineers.
However doing this does produce a tiny echo on the fiber and it is theoretically possible for the cable operator to find the tap using timed reflectrometry equipment.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"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.