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New Baltic Data Cable Plan Unfolding
jones_supa writes "Details are shaping up of a plan for a new government-backed high capacity data cable between Germany and Finland, routed through the Baltic Sea. The project to significantly upgrade Finland's international data transfer capacity has long been high on the government's list of priorities. It could improve the country's competitiveness in ICT technologies and digital services. Following a meeting of the cabinet's economic policy committee on Wednesday, Pekka Haavisto, the minister responsible for state ownership steering, told the press that the state will take part in the venture as a partial owner. The estimated cost of the undersea data cable project is around 100 million euros. Haavisto said that roughly one third of the costs could be paid by the state, another third by institutional investors and the remainder by private companies. So far, all data transmission to Finland has taken place via the Øresund Bridge, that is through Denmark and Sweden."
And as a useful side effect to stops GCHQ and NSA from spying on all those communications between Finland and Germany. Well at least until they manage to tap the fibre optic underwater without Germany noticing the signal reduction.
*If* above ground lines can be tapped the US Navy will figure out how to tap underwater lines. They've been doing that sort of stuff for many many decades. I expect that the British and Russians have a similar capability. Deep, dark, cold water does not provide the protection most people assume. Deep waters hides those who would tamper with the line. That bridge currently being used may provide better security since it is observable.
It is going to be a bitch sneaking a US nuclear submarine into this particular area.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Actually, no. Since we know from the Snowden leaks that the Swedish FRA is in cahoots with NSA and GSHQ, anything that passes through Sweden will automatically be scanned. A new undersea cable that bypasses Sweden thus has infinitely better chances of being secure.
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/nov/01/gchq-europe-spy-agencies-mass-surveillance-snowden
"There's someone in my head but it's not me." - Pink Floyd, Dark Side of the Moon
All those ships dragging their anchors over the fiber optics was a complete coincidence.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Of course they can tap underwater links, we even know the companies that do it, but can they do it without the Germans detecting it, and will the Germans encrypt the link anyway?:
Glimmerglass make a range of covert taps and software interception equipment:
http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/docs/glimmerglass/275_transparent-signal-access-and-monitoring.html
http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/docs/glimmerglass/274_electronic-blitz-intelligence-ops-are-poised-to-gather-move.html
http://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/docs/glimmerglass/55_glimmerglass-cybersweep.html
That bridge route traverses Sweden which is one of the countries compromised by NSA surveillance, CIA political shaping. So Finland probably won't trust the Swedes to be loyal to Europe more than the US.
See 'Britain and Sweden block EU investigation into NSA spying":
http://www.dailydot.com/news/britain-uk-sweden-block-spying-investigation/
It is going to be a bitch sneaking a US nuclear submarine into this particular area.
That's why we have SEAL Delivery Vehicles. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SEAL_Delivery_Vehicle
Haven't you seen it? It's huge.
There are more jumpers are the Finnish end though.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
German telco/gov staff will give all to the NSA as it has always done and will do. GCHQ was very interested in Finland over its past telco brands and emerging cell phone tech exports.
A new cable is great for the local ping and bandwidth costs but offers the same security as any cable in any part of the EU - none.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
you would have better luck with german style smaller subs, I doubt those delivery vehicles have that long of a range to make it through from the entrance to the baltic sea to the cable.
though subs in the baltic isn't really unheard of, but if they just encrypt the link at the ends and take the keys over with a ferry every now and then, that way it gets pretty expensive and pointless to tap it there(even if hw for performing on the fly encryption might be expensive as well).. also, they would pretty much have to perform any filtering they want on the data at the tap point - or run an equally expensive cable from the tap point. though I'm pretty sure german and finnish industry would gladly sell them the expensive cabling needed for it, were cia stupid enough to pay for it.
so why bother? NSA and CIA being super afraid that the last real nazis have re-emerged in Finland after hiding out there after WW2 and are secretly re-arming Germany by doing product development by utilizing Finnish metal industry(there's some history there you know) and that the sale of Nokia to MS was an elaborate ruse to get Finnish agents into dev teams so they could backdoor windows and all that was going to be planned over the undersea link ? ? ?
anyhow, the baltic sea is a muddy mess so good luck for whoever has to do it.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Serious question: If the NSA is tapping the lines via submarine, just how in the hell are they able to capture and storage that much data? There's no way they can process an entire fiber feed from the subs on-board computers, and the drives would fill up in a heartbeat assuming the disks aren't I/O bound.
Life is not for the lazy.
Pigzip.
Maybe so, then again that might not be necessary as NSA are on very good terms with their Swedish equivalent FRA as revealed by a Snowden leak published in Sweden a couple of days ago which reported how FRA assisted NSA in the hacking of target machines in operation Winterlight. I can easily see how Sweden would bend over backwards to help USA gaining physical access to the cables just like with the extraordinary rendition of two asylum seekers in December 2001.
I long ago ceased being proud of the (imaginary) neutrality and foreign politics of my native Sweden, and sadly find it easier and easier to explain why over a decade ago I decided to leave Sweden and its great health care, education, welfare, beautiful nature and so forth.
"I have downloaded hundreds and hundreds of records, why would I care if somebody downloads ours?" Robin Pecknold
They won't be storing it all.
At a guess, I expect they record all traffic with source or destination addressed of a specific IP (government official's home computers, that sort of thing), and also extract just summary data from certain protocols (All port 25 traffic will be checked to see if it's SMTP, and if so source/dest addresses and subjects captured, and possibly message bodies.) There's no point capturing, say, all facebook traffic when they can obtain it directly from Facebook's servers anyway.
According to the Swedish news, Russia sends a good deal of its internet traffic via Sweden to the outside world. They say that the Swedish link is faster and cheaper. Meanwhile the Swedish equivalent of the NSA, called FRA, is spying on Russian traffic (legally) and it sends valuable info on to the US (legality unclear).
Finland:
1) Build a new data link that circumvents Sweden's NSA-friendly surveillance
2) Make it only slightly more expensive than the current data link via Sweden, but tout your net neutrality
3) Sell boatloads of capacity to Russia
4) Profit
Vaya con huevos, my darling.