NSA/U.S. Navy Working to Intercept Fiber Optic Cables

Jeff Robertson writes: "Fiber optic cables have advantage of being difficult to wiretap. As optical amplifiers replace electro-optical regenerators in undersea routes, it gets even harder. Lightwave Magazine has an article quoting the Washington Post as claiming the National Security Agency 'is known to be hard at work trying to gain access to fiber optic cables' and the U.S. Navy will spend '$1 billion to retrofit its premier spy submarine, the USS Jimmy Carter' to get access to deep-sea fiber routes. They also assert that the U.S. government is bailing out Global Crossing to prevent its undersea routes falling into foreign hands."

Comments

second part makes sense

[tps12]

I can see why we'd spend money making sure we control strategic communications channels. Remember that that cable, like the US interstate system and the Internet's predecessor (ARPAnet), were designed at least partially for military applications in the even of thermonucular warfare. Granted, today it's all just part of the international pr0n industry, but you have to remember that there was a reason the military dished out all that money in the first place.

Re:second part makes sense

[Sc00ter]

" mile out of 5 had to be straight for emergency aircraft landings"

This actually isn't true..

From :

"Richard Weingroff, information liaison specialist for the Federal Highway Administration's Office of Infrastructure and the FHA's unofficial historian, says the closest any of this came to touching base with reality was in 1944, when Congress briefly considered the possibility of including funding for emergency landing strips in the Federal Highway-Aid Act (the law that authorized designation of a "National System of Interstate Highways"). At no point was the idea kited of using highways or other roads to land planes on; the proposed landing strips would have been built alongside major highways, with the highways serving to handle ground transportation access to and from these strips. The proposal was quickly dropped, and no more was ever heard of it.

Some references to the one-mile-in-five assertion claim it's part of the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956. This piece of legislation committed the federal government to build what became the 42,800-mile Eisenhower Interstate Highway System, which makes it the logical item to cite concerning regulations about how the interstate highway system was to be laid out. The act did not, however, contain any "one-in-five" requirement, nor did it even suggest the use of stretches of the interstate system as emergency landing strips. The one-out-of-five rule was not part of any later legislation either. "

this is not news.

[discogravy]

"The NSA is spying, and trying to get better at it."

Well, duh. That's what the NSA does. Good article on a GREAT book about the NSA. Heard the author speaking on NPR a while ago, which drove me to pick up the book. Excellent, excellent book.

Not saying this isn't news...

[ScuzzMonkey]

But I don't think it's new news. Those agencies have been actively (and presumably successfully) tapping fiber optic cables since the late eighties or so. Blind Man's Bluff details the difficulties in running the taps and the techniques used to overcome them. Interesting read, whether you're for or against.

Re:Not saying this isn't news...

[Maax]

I was going to post a link to the very same book, but you beat me to it.

Also, check out the old but interesting Submarine, a nonfiction Tom Clancy factfest that has lots of detail on the Jimmy Carter class boats. The Jimmy Carter was designed as a 'special projects' boat from the beginning.

Fiber is very easy to tap.

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw at a local junk shop around 10 years ago a fiber tap. It is a clamp the holds the fiber and bends the fiber at the same time with a pickup. The pickup just looks at the leaked light at the bend.

Sniff...

[TweeKinDaBahx]

It's a real drag that the US Government needs to monitor global telecommunications, but there are good reasons behind it. At least what many citizens of the US and myself consider good reasons...

Sure, keeping terrorism, global crime, and child porn under control are part of it, but where does the line get drawn? If the US can tap these lines, what's to say that other countries aren't entitled to do the same? What's to say they aren't already?

I can understand the need for cyberintelligence and early warning, but I feel the need to bring up the issue of privacy in general. There's so little privacy on the 'net already, do we really need big brother watching what we do in even more depth?

Uncle Sam doesn't have the right to read my mail, but if the government is tapped into the global trunk, sniffing every packet, what's to say they won't read my e-mail, catalouge my credit cards, and track my information habits?

There is a line that must be drawn, and it should be drawn before it's too late.

Echelon

[frovingslosh]

If it's on fiber, they already have it! Do a little research into Echelon. Just one example, apparently our friend the Brits have detoured almost every piece of fiber over ther through a US NSA facility.

Tech to do this has been around a long time

[Tangential]

I worked on a project with a company in California back in the mid-80s that took advantage of an non-intrusive optical coupler that they had patented. The coupler placed a microbend in the fiber and cound extract or insert light from the fiber. In the extract mode, it was almost impossible to measure the attenuation change in the light and detect the coupling. Of course, doing this underwater is a bit tricky.

I had always assumed that the government made covert use of this technology. Who knows?

It's not plain SONET on those fibers...

[Papineau]

I worked for two different fiber optics equipment companies (although a large part of the second company had worked for the first previously).

One of the problems I see is that once the optical signal is inside the network, it's encoded in a special manner, diffferent for each equipment (to improve performance, add more error checking, force the carrier to continue to buy from the same vendor). So you can't just listen to it the same way as a phone line. What's in the fiber under the ocean is not as standard as what's on a copper line.

Also, how are you supposed to interpret it? Given a single wavelenght ans OC-192 speeds, it's 10Gb/s (bit, not byte). If you multiply by the maximum number of wavelengths that a fiber can carry (~160), you get 1600Gb/s. It begins to be a bit too much for the kind of computer that we can buy, although the NSA can probably afford it. But then, would they put it on a sub? Or relay the raw information to a ground station?

Other problem: sequential packets are not guaranteed to pass by the same fiber, or even the same carrier. There's probably a good chance that they do, but no guarantee ("We intercepted the following message: "The next target is S...". The rest went somewhere else. If you live in a city starting by S, please don't panic."). Unless they want to spy on privately owned fibers, where they're more sure to get all they want in that fiber...

This is just FUD

[Fefe]

...to make you believe that those cables aren't already tapped. Even the Stasi secret service from the format East Germany was able to tap fiber optics. This is no problem at all, the only problem is that while you apply the tap, the line is interrupted. So, if you tap the line while it is installed, nobody is the wiser.

Also, tapping the repeaters is no problem, and in the Echelon discussion, at least one photo of a US submarine designed explicitly for installing taps on submarine cables and repeaters was publicized.

There is no reason to believe that the submarine cables aren't tapped by every major secret service. And even if they weren't, the points where the cables leave the sea and the major routers, POTS switches and exchange points are tapped.

Also, the paragraph about Global Crossing is bogus or even a Red Herring. Nobody in their right mind would rely on a line not being tapped, especially an international line. Their lines leave the sea to enter Europe or whatever country somewhere, and you can be sure that they are tapped there by the respective country and their allies.