NYT reports today on a new book, "Blind Man's Bluff," which reports on the US's success at placing surveillance devices on Soviet subsea communications cables around the world. With much technical detail about how it was done, beginning with the simple but overlooked idea of locating shoreline warning signs about undersea cables then tracking from there. The devices, some up to 20 feet long for housing elaborate processing equipment, captured electronic emanations, thereby eluding detection measures aimed at physical taps. One was found by the Soviets but most were not and much information on the program is still classified. AT&T and Bell labs built many of them. The US Navy will not comment on the book, citing national security restrictions. The Times also has an obituary for Tommy Flowers, the gent who guided construction of Colossus machines at Bletchley Park to break top-level German codes during WW II. There's still interesting debate about the Paul Dore story of picking up signals from space, which he first thought were from aliens, but which seems more likely to be from a surveillance satellite, and possibly from a type not publicly known. Not enough data yet to show that the story is not a hoax, or disinformation by US/UK spy agencies, but it has led to informative discussion of what such signals could indicate. Notes on this at: http://jya.com/project415.htm More commentary welcome, here or privately. Some will recall a vigorous discussion here a few years back about listening in on US undersea cables, commencing at the landfall points (dense packs of them here in the NYC area), many handily marked on coastal seafaring maps. Or, for more up-to-date technology, setting a receiver to point in the direction of those on TLA bases (needing an x-ray of the concealing radome).