undersea cable cuts

Dave Howe DaveHowe at gmx.co.uk
Sun Feb 10 04:31:26 PST 2008


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.)





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