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America Uses Stealthy Submarines To Hack Other Countries' Systems (washingtonpost.com)
When the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump asked Russia -- wittingly or otherwise -- to launch hack attacks to find Hillary Clinton's missing emails, it caused a stir of commotion. Russia is allegedly behind DNC's leaked emails. But The Washington Post is reminding us that U.S.'s efforts in the cyber-security world aren't much different. (could be paywalled; same article syndicated elsewhere From the report: The U.S. approach to this digital battleground is pretty advanced. For example: Did you know that the military uses its submarines as underwater hacking platforms? In fact, subs represent an important component of America's cyber strategy. They act defensively to protect themselves and the country from digital attack, but -- more interestingly -- they also have a role to play in carrying out cyberattacks, according to two U.S. Navy officials at a recent Washington conference. "There is a -- an offensive capability that we are, that we prize very highly," said Rear Adm. Michael Jabaley, the U.S. Navy's program executive officer for submarines. "And this is where I really can't talk about much, but suffice to say we have submarines out there on the front lines that are very involved, at the highest technical level, doing exactly the kind of things that you would want them to do."
The so-called "silent service" has a long history of using information technology to gain an edge on America's rivals. In the 1970s, the U.S. government instructed its submarines to tap undersea communications cables off the Russian coast, recording the messages being relayed back and forth between Soviet forces. (The National Security Agency has continued that tradition, monitoring underwater fiber cables as part of its globe-spanning intelligence-gathering apparatus. In some cases, the government has struck closed-door deals with the cable operators ensuring that U.S. spies can gain secure access to the information traveling over those pipes.) These days, some U.S. subs come equipped with sophisticated antennas that can be used to intercept and manipulate other people's communications traffic, particularly on weak or unencrypted networks. "We've gone where our targets have gone" -- that is to say, online, said Stewart Baker, the National Security Agency's former general counsel, in an interview. "Only the most security-conscious now are completely cut off from the Internet." Cyberattacks are also much easier to carry out than to defend against, he said.
The so-called "silent service" has a long history of using information technology to gain an edge on America's rivals. In the 1970s, the U.S. government instructed its submarines to tap undersea communications cables off the Russian coast, recording the messages being relayed back and forth between Soviet forces. (The National Security Agency has continued that tradition, monitoring underwater fiber cables as part of its globe-spanning intelligence-gathering apparatus. In some cases, the government has struck closed-door deals with the cable operators ensuring that U.S. spies can gain secure access to the information traveling over those pipes.) These days, some U.S. subs come equipped with sophisticated antennas that can be used to intercept and manipulate other people's communications traffic, particularly on weak or unencrypted networks. "We've gone where our targets have gone" -- that is to say, online, said Stewart Baker, the National Security Agency's former general counsel, in an interview. "Only the most security-conscious now are completely cut off from the Internet." Cyberattacks are also much easier to carry out than to defend against, he said.
Because as everyone saw with the Wikileaks DNC release, Democrats fund astroturfers to spread lies all around the internet. I wouldn't doubt the Republicans do it too, but the DNC ones are 100% proven. As more and more negative Hillary evidence is revealed, they only thing they can do is deflect and try to pin the blame on somebody else. Hence all the "evil Russians" stories this last week.
In the past, when America would do this, it was cheered by the American populace. It was thought a good thing that America should have an advantage, and quite natural and obvious that we should do these things. After all, everyone else is spying on us, and fair's fair!
Now, the American media works overtime exposing every advantage America tries to get over other countries, and when writing about it, uses a chiding, tut-tut-tut tone that clearly indicates that what America is doing is wrong. How times have changed, eh? Americans aren't even allowed to be pro-America any more. The elites in the media heartily disapprove of these sorts of America-helping shenanigans and disapprove more of those Americans who want their own country to have an advantage.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
As khallow said, they add the taps during scheduled downtime. They also add the taps during an outage. And you can imagine how easy it is to arrange for a trawler to "accidentally" drag it's anchor across the ocean floor. There is some risk of being detected by diagnostic equipment at either end of the cable, since they can determine the distance to the break, but if the trawler break and submarine tap are 10 miles apart, the sub should go unnoticed, and the difference in distance is within a margin of error.
They are going to destroy Trump with garbage because the American people are too stupid to reject him for the truly horrible things he's said and done.
It's like getting Al Capone for tax evasion.
Play Command HQ online
Because it's easier to go on about Trump then accept the reality of what Clinton has done so far with power.
Folks go on about Trump, because he's a bit of a loose canon.
However, there is one good thing about a loose canon . . . it will clear the deck and this is something Washington DC badly needs. Clear the deck of the government.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
You don't even have to cut it, just bend the strands enough so the some leaks out the side of the glass.
This is exactly what they do. They have something like a diving bell that they can loop a submarine cable through and seal it. They can then transfer some technicians from the mother sub to the bell through an airlock where they can peel the armor off the cable, isolate individual fibers and wrap them around such optical couplers.
How do you know? are you there? have you seen it?
Where does the data go? current industry practice is to run submarine cables at 192x100G. That's 19.2Tbit/s.
Without a fiber backhaul from their underwater tap to a safe harbor for analysis, there is just no way to process that level of data.
And for what purpose, all a country would have to do, is mandate that all it's teleports use symmetric encryption and all those expensive taps, and phantom backhaul network (which would cost more than the worlds existing submarine network, as it would have to be longer in total path length, and laid by submarines to be unknownabout) would be useless. Also the connection where the cable splits into 2 cables would be noticed when the cable operator hauls the cable on deck for inspection and repair.