Tyler Durden wrote:
Tapping an underwater cable is far, far harder, but the NSA is known by fiber guys to have at least two of the very expensive and very specialized subs necessary.
I was under the impression that there were regeneration nodes every so many tends of KM (essentially receiver/emitter pairs, with a bit of logic in the middle to reshape the pulses to keep them clean) and always assumed at least some of those were equipped with additional logic to allow a suitably equipped sub to simply clamp an inductive coil around the node and "ask" the node to emit signal in EM form so the sub could listen in... how many of the bundled fibres you could that for in parallel would be a design issue though, albeit a minor one (using a clamp-on coil surrounding the entire node, you could pretty much use the entire radio spectrum as bandwidth and assign one frequency per repeater; I suspect you would need to supply power inductively too though, given the power requirements for an "active" node of this time would go though the roof compared to normal operation.)