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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."
Despite the prevalent opinion on Slashdot (and my own) the government does need the ability to monitor telecommunications. Given proper authority by warrants and what-not, the government should be given every possible tool and ability to protect the nation, within sensible limits, always.
--Kevin
Unlike the current President, Jimmy Carter had a record of honorable active military service.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Well, kind of, unless you happen to know that he was a nuclear submarine officer before he was president. If you know that, then it makes a lot more sense than some naming decisions (USS Ronald Reagan? I guess he probably played a sailor in a movie at some point... oh, and there are all those appropriations bills he signed, yeah).
No relation to Happy Monkey
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.
Every time the trans-Atlantic connections are down they give us this same line about the "sharks who like to chew on cables", and all the while it has been a bunch of Navy SEALs trying to patch an optical wiretap, equipped with a combat knife and a legth of wire?
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
I'm just saying the could have named it the "USS Badass" or something :)
Oh jeez, I had to read the article to make sure this wasn't some sort of Simpsons joke. I know, I know, Jimmy was a Nuke Engineer on a Sub before he drove the country into double digit inflation and created the misery index while wearing a sweater. But I was shocked that he already had a military ship named after him. Anyone know what the rules are for that? Is it a military thing or a Congressional?
I thought this was interesting:
They also assert that the U.S. government is bailing out Global Crossing to prevent its undersea routes falling into foreign hands.
The Global Crossing bankruptcy is as large as Enron but the Press hasn't hyped it as much. There have been many conspiracy theories as to why. This might be the real reason and not because the DNC Nation Chairman turned $100,000 into $18 million. The press might be protecting National Security because the Government has told them to shut up over the bankruptcy. Rumor was that the communist Chinese were itching to get their hands on it just like the Panama Canal. Anyone remember how communist Chinese got that? (Well at least both entry points).
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
"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.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
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.
No relation to Happy Monkey
One more excuse from your ISP:
"What, you going to tell me your backbone took a backhoe?"
"No, it was run into by a super-secret spy subm--."
It's ironic that the article talks about terrorists using these things, so they need to tap fiber. Hasn't it become clear from the news of the last week or so that the FBI, CIA, etc. have plenty of information, they just don't know how to use it?
This man's life is dedicated to peace, so they name a war machine after him. I know he was a nuke engineer and that is the reason for the dubbing.
Now that we are in a constant state of war, the USS Jimmy Carter will allow all messages of the enemy du jour to be intercepted [and modified] by the military industrial complex. Great
"What is the sound of one belly slapping?"
I believe I have seen the light.
In a business climate such as this, where the US will bail out Global Crossing just to ensure that the business won't "fall into foreign hands", I think we, the slashdotters who are out to make a buck or two, should sit up and take attention !
1. Go set up your own underwater fibre cable laying / operating company.
2. Go to the banks and take BILLIONS and BILLIONS of loans.
3. Either by some existing money loosing underwater fiber cable operation, or lay some more cable on the already saturated routes.
4. If your business loose one USD on the operation, cook the book so that it looks like it's making one USD, and so on.
5. In the meantime, make yourself rich by pocketing a portion of the "difference", between the actual accounting, and the one the "cooked book" is showing. The rest of the difference, you can always invite Dick Cheney or whoever is from the Bush adminstration, to join your "Board of Directors", and let them pocket the rest of the loot.
6. Sooner or later, the "cookery" will be exposed. By that time, you would have BILLIONS in reserve, and you will have Dick Cheney and/or others from the Bush adminstration working FOR you, and covering up all your criminal act.
7. Under the guise of "national security", with the reason that your company is "too important to fall into foreign hands", the Bush adminstration will BUY UP YOUR CRUMBLED COMPANY, and they will PAY YOU A HANDSOME PROFIT too !
8. When you done all that, please don't forget www.slashdot.org. Donate some of your loot here, so all of us can continue to enjoy
Thank you very much for your attention.
PS: The above is for educational purpose only. Neither Slashdot nor I will assume any liability on anything, if you are stupid enough to do what I've just written above.
PPS: But of course, if you become richer than God, then, please, share your loot with all of us, thank you!
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Despite the prevalent opinion on Slashdot (and my own) the government does need the ability to monitor telecommunications. Given proper authority by warrants and what-not, the government should be given every possible tool and ability to protect the nation, within sensible limits, always.
How about setting those sensible limits at your borders? Respect other country's privacy for once.
Stop being a bunch of international bullies/control freaks. The cold war is over.
This could be the start of a trend in sub naming. If the NSA named their sub the Jimmy Carter because of carter's service on a sub, maybe they could continue this practice of naming ships after presidential habits. Think of the possibilities?
USS Bill Clinton : The boat never seems to work quite the way everyone wants it too, and its outer hull is exceptionally slick. Easy to Catch, but tough to prove it really did something wrong.
USS Willaim Howard Taft : Big, unwieldy, Just kind of sits there and looks odd.
USS George Bush : Another spy ship along the lines of the Bill Clinton. A mistake in the shipyard causes the orders to say one thing and do another. Open switches close valves, and vice versa. Expected service life is only half that of a normal ship. Recently underwent minor modifications and re-entered service under the Name USS George W. Bush
USS Ronald Regan : Essentially useless as a spy ship as it sufffers continual memory errors. Those who served on the Regan however continue to tout the ship as the greatest ship in the inventory, asking monuments to it be built, and crediting the ship with single handedly winning every war since korea. the rest of the navy just rolls their eyes while waiting for it to be mothballed
USS Gerald Ford : Pressed into service after the scrapping of the USS Richard Nixon (removed from service after being too effective), The Ford has suffered from no less than 18 dry dock accidents, mostly relating to the ship rolling off the pillars used to support it.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Here is a link describing wht the Jimmy Carter is getting- basically a bigger SEAL delivery system, probably with the ability to drop a carried bathysphere or other goodies.
The Jimmy Carter is too high value a ship to just keep out on fiber patrol- independent of her spec-ops function she can pretty much conventionally destroy most navies by herself thanks to that 50-weapon loadout, being quieter running at speed then the Los Angeles subs at dock, and that wide-aperture sonar. So making her a $3 billion dollar satellite feed doesn't make sense.
Therefore they must be planning to hook into the fiber-optic network, and spool off their own fiber line to a discrete uplink several hundred miles away. The upgrade must be to allow for all that equipment.
________________________________________ History Must Not Fall Into The Wrong Hands ___________________________________
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...
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.
This is kind of a dumb debate. Mainly because people already have entrenched views and it boils down to "duz too!" and "duz not!".
For the record: Most countries spy. However, if a people sanction spying by their country on others and accept that their government has a right to do so (ie they as the people should not be stopping their government from doing it), they can scarcely take the moral high ground when it is done in return to them or when their allies (not enemies I say!) discover they are being spied on and become rather upset.
It's one thing to spy quietly and mostly innocuously and try very hard not to let anyone in your country or anywhere else know you are doing it. It is another thing to publicly make available the fact you are setting out to violate other countries' private communications. Especially when some of those countries are: military allies, political allies, and long standing trade partners.
I think the simple rule here is: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And if you happen to think the fact that America owns an extremely temporary (from a historical perspective) hegemony in technology and military force over most of the world and that somehow confers a right to use such power as a club to forward its own agenda and that this is morally correct behaviour, then you should be equally happy when someone one day returns the favour.
I don't really care what side of this fence anyone is on, but it does piss me off when they try to occupy both sides (spying while decrying same, invading and bombing other sovereign nations and supporting death squads and covert ops in other nations while decrying same).
Another phrase comes to mind: Sew the wind, reap the whirlwind.
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."