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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
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 :)
"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.
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 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...