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.

Comments

Getting the data back to the NSA...

[Velox_SwiftFox]

The only way I can see this happening is if the NSA installed their own undersea fiberoptic cable to send it back to themselves on.

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...

- "You've got an anti-anti-antimissle missle? Well, we've got an anti-anti-anti-antimissle missle!" - Get Smart!

A Message to our friends at NSA

[CleverNickName]

When I read stories about things like this, with agencies like NSA monitoring everything I send for keywords, it makes me want to say:

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Re:This is impossible. Or not.

[WolfWithoutAClause]

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.

Project was caught

[6EQUJ5]

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.