On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 17:01:05 -0500, Tyler Durden <camera_lumina@hotmail.com> wrote:
... Do you take a copy of EVERYTHING and send it back? That might have been more feasible in the old days, but when a single fiber can run 64 wavelength optically amplified 10 Gig traffic, I really really doubt it. Or at least, this would require an undertaking large enough that I doubt they could hide it.
DWDM certainly makes it more complicated. Of course, that same technology allows them to send much more back. (Regarding the single OC-3 mentioned previously.) How they process and return the information is indeed the BIG SECRET. The old USSR taps used pods attached to the cables for recording and were serviced periodically to pick up the collected data. See also: http://cryptome.org/nsa-fibertap.htm
... I suspect it's a combination of all sorts of stuff...remember too that all that traffic has to land somewhere, so theoretically they can access a good deal of it terrestrially.
If you look at the landing sites for various oceanic fiber cables you will see that a great many of them are on "friendly" territory. You can be sure that these lines are tapped. (Which brings up the issue someone else mentioned a while ago. We make a big deal about ECHELON monitoring satellites, yet no one really cares about the tapping of landing sites that carry many times more information? Silly humans) I presume the fiber tapping submarine is interested mainly in those cables which don't land on friendly territory or the sections landed between unfriendly sites. (E.g. not all data goes through all sites)
What you might see, therefore, is a sheath coming out of, say Iran, is tapped for fibers that proceed on to other unfriendly nations, and a copy of the traffic pulled back to some nearby land-based station in a friendly country (so that lots of amplifiers aren't needed).
This would be a reasonable assumption. But so would a number of other possible techniques. The great mystery continues... Best regards,