undersea cable cuts

[J.A. Terranson]

On Sun, 10 Feb 2008, Dave Howe wrote:

> 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) 

On land, yes.  At sea?  To be honest, I never really considered it...  
Thinking about it though, my guess would be no.  I base that on several 
things:

(a) The location of the break is determined via OTDR.  How can you know 
where your reflection originates if you have regen stations?

(b) Power requirements are very significant at regens: where does all this 
happy juice come from at the floor of the sea?

(c) Regen stations would introduce elevated failure rates that are not 
seen (by me.  YMMV).

> 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... 

I find this hard to buy into for all of the above, *plus* the difficulty 
of shoving multiple fibers through such an inductive device.  I simply 
dont believe it possible.

> 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.)

Exactly.  Even if they try to multiplex on top of themselves, there just 
no way.

As has been pointed out by many (even myself I think), these breaks are 
clearly an organized event, but of unknown purpose.  as was astutely 
pointed out, the guys who would want to do the cutting are separate from 
and antithetical to, the guys who want to do the monitoring.  Also, the 
guys who want to do the monitoring dont need to be breaking cables to do 
it - they bring out the Jimmy Carter (now that her sister is truly 
mothballed) and they do it in a nice dry lab on the ocean floor, with a 
good cup of hot coffe fresh from nuclear irradiation (er, "heating").

I see no point to these acts, but neither can I deny that these acts 
*must* have been deliberate.  And I do not pretend to know what everyone 
else could possibly be considering as motives.  I do particularly like the 
hypothesis put forward about testing the responses of places nobody 
otherwise cares about, but thats just the shit disturber in me, I'm sure 
;-)

//Alif

--
Yours,
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin_at_mfn.org
0xBD4A95BF


What religion, please tell me, tells you as a follower of that religion
to occupy another country and kill its people? Please tell me. Does
Christianity tell its followers to do that? Judaism, for that matter?
Islam, for that matter? What prophet tells you to send 160,000 troops
to another country, kill men, women, and children? You just can't wear
your religion on your sleeve or just go to church. You should be
truthfully religious.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad