Wired on "Secrecy Power Sinks Patent Case"

Tyler Durden camera_lumina at hotmail.com
Tue Sep 20 09:14:13 PDT 2005


Very interesting CPunks reading, for a variety of reasons.

http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,68894,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1

Of course, the fact that Lucent has been in shit shape financially must have 
nothing to do with what is effectively a state-sponsored protection of 
intellectual theft and profiting by Lucent (merely keeping the tech under 
wraps would have been possible in a closed-doors session. Remember that 
connectors can easily cost $50 per or more, so these guys were really ripped 
off and Lucent probably made out quite well.)

Aside from this the links are worth pursuing vz Variola Suitcase type 
discussions.

I suspect that a thorough civilian analysis could reveal a lot about NSA's 
undersea operation. One thing I can see about this connector is that it does 
not require any visual orientation in order to mate the Bragg-angled fiber 
interfaces inside...other connectors either mismate if you're not careful, 
or require rotating the ferrule in order to get the notch to line up. 
(Low-loss fiber connectors are Bragg-angled in order to prevent 
reflections.) These might not be viable options at deep depths, indicating 
that some of their operation must be done extra-vehicular (though by humans 
or robots I can't yet tell.)

Their carrying on about HOW they select traffic is, I suspect, true: They 
must have some kind of control and switching network in some areas in order 
to select out some traffic, and I believe I've seen parts of this...the 
bandwidth is just too large to develop a complete 1:1 copy of everything, 
when we're talking middle-of-the-ocean-type applications. (And as I've also 
stated many times, I'd bet NSA has a HUGE risk analysis department to 
support the decisons about which traffic to grab.)

-TD





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