undersea cable cuts

[Tyler Durden]

No real ruminations are needed on these subjects: They're known and by no
means secret.

Regenerators are mostly gone now, both on land and undersea, replaced by the
optical fiber amplifier.

Undersea cables carry electrical power through a lining in their sheeth.

An OTDR can't see past a traditional regenerator: The fiber span is
terminated. (It also can't see past an optical fiber amplifier because of the
isolators that keep the ASE from lasing inside the amplifier.)

Tapping an optical fiber is absolutely trivial, more trivial than tapping a
(copper) cable carrying an electrical signal. This isn't inside inside
knowledge, even the guys in the trucks know it.

Tapping an undersea optical cable, however, is a completely different matter,
and it's VERY difficult, though routinely done by NSA, etc...

Undersea cables do occasionally break, but the net-quoted statistic of
approximately 12 breaks at any one time throughout the world is entirely
misleading: There are millions of route-miles spanning the Atlantic, the
Pacific and everywhere else. This means that the odds of three or four breaks
in a small area are practically zero. They are designed to be extremely
resilient, and this design choice has been quite successful. A simple anchor
(even from a large ship) is not in general going to cut a cable.


-TD

> Date: Sun, 10 Feb 2008 21:14:02 -0600> From: measl at mfn.org> To:
DaveHowe at gmx.co.uk> CC: cypherpunks at al-qaeda.net> Subject: Re: undersea cable
cuts> > 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
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