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).
On Sun, Nov 08, 1998 at 02:51:07PM -0800, Steve Schear wrote:
With the advent of fiber optics capable of repeater-less operation over transoceanic distances, one would think this sort of underwater surveilence would be come much more difficult.
Actually they use optical amplifiers rather than repeaters and are thus repeaterless in that sense rather than depending on the loss of a single passive fiber being small enough to work all the way across the pond. But one supposes the technology of tapping the cables must have been developed, though indeed a lot harder because one has to actually dig into the cable (and deal with the high voltage for powering the amplifiers and so forth) and tap the individual fibers with quantum coupling type taps. And one supposes the taps are more detectable. The whole issue may be moot by virtue of the extent to which the carriers are in bed with UKUSA anyway, however, as there aren't very many fiber cables run by unfreindly parties unwilling to part with the bitstream...
--Steve
-- Dave Emery N1PRE, die@die.com DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass. PGP fingerprint = 2047/4D7B08D1 DE 6E E1 CC 1F 1D 96 E2 5D 27 BD B0 24 88 C3 18
None of them were even known, much less found, until Ronald Pelton starting pointing them out to the russkies on a world map. At 09:45 AM 11/08/1998 -0500, John Young wrote:
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.
-Renegade
participants (3)
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Dave Emery -
John Young -
Renegade