Posted on 08/28/2023 10:10:44 AM PDT by Robert DeLong
Interesting video detailing how all of the underground cables in the oceans allows for listening in on all communications passing through these myriad of submarined cables worldwide.
If nothing else, it's interesting just how many of these cables there are.
But, the bad part is there is no privacy anymore. The good thing is that it's makes keeping track of bad guys easier.
Tapping a fiber optic bundle isn’t quite so simple.
“Tapping a fiber optic bundle isn’t quite so simple.”
It’s not easy on land in a controlled environment. On the sea floor? That increases the difficulty by several orders of magnitude. Not saying it can’t be done, of course.
L
Actually, the bad part is totalitarianism.
VPNs can make this all okay.
Reminds me of Operation “Ivy Bells” where the NSA/CIA/USN
wiretapped the undersea cable located between the Soviet Pacific Fleet naval base at Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula to the Soviet Pacific Fleet’s mainland headquarters at Vladivostok. They did this utilizing a submarine and USN divers.
The Soviets had no idea we were tapping the cable until an NSA civilian employee who was also fluent in Russian, Ronald Pelton, entered the Soviet Embassy in D.C. in 1980 and told them all about it. For a price of course. Pelton was, at the time, $65K in debt. A lot of money in 1980.
Pelton was eventually caught and sentenced to a long stretch in prison. The Soviets located the tap and dismantled it.
President Donald Trump is a "bad guy", according to the illegitimate Tater junta.
I read it when it was released - it showed the good, the bad, and the ugly - I recommend it to all folks who have an interest in technical espionage.
if a bad actor were to cut all of these cables really bad things would happen.
I remember when one got cut by a ship anchor and it screwed up the internet for the country it connected to for the months it took to fix.
if you were to cut each one in several places in deep water they might not even be able to fix it
“The good thing is that it’s makes keeping track of bad guys easier.”
Are there any good guys that can listen in?
NSA wised up since then—and started focusing on tapping physical devices at the manufacturer level and software at the developer level as well as “monkey in the middle” tactics.
If folks want privacy they need to stick to dogs and cats.
Telecommunication has relied on cables since the start. And yes that means somebody can listen in. Of course even via satellite (which is taking over a lot, cables are insanely expensive) somebody can still listen in.
Here’s the basic math: if your communication goes through somebody’s hardware they can listen in.
Not as bad as you might think. One of the strengths of the Internet is that there are multiple pathways that data packets can take. Cut an Atlantic line joining North America and Europe, and the traffic will be rerouted to another cable from North America to South America to Africa to Europe.
VPNs just make it harder for them to know they’re listening to you. They can still listen plenty though.
Great book! I loved the part where the sailor looking at the camera footage as they were looking for the cable to change the tap on, had to look, with hour after hour of excruciating boredom with no visible features on the ocean floor, when all of a sudden the skull of some cow came into view and scared the crap out of the guy...it had been placed on top of the tap by a previous crew...:)
Bkmrk
I also enjoyed how they found the submarine cable-they just stuck the periscope up and looked for the signs on each shore that said something like DO NOT ANCHOR HERE-COMMUNICATION CABLE PRESENT and knew the cable stretched between them!
Ah yes, the good ol’ days of long distance individual twisted copper pairs. If the Minnow gang wanted to get picked up faster, they should have just cut the cable in half and waited. Someone in a ship would have been along soon enough to repair it given the scope of the outage they would have caused.
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