| tapping into, fiber optic cable. This is a very tricky task, considering the high voltage running through the cable
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Posted on 04/09/2005 12:23:55 PM PDT by quidnunc
American intelligence agencies have less trouble getting information, than in finding ways to store it. This situation changed in the 1990s as fiber optic cable became the cheapest way to move huge amounts of electronic data at the speed of light. One of the major money pits during the dot.com boom was companies laying hundreds of thousands of kilometers of fiber optic cable across land and under the sea, replacing the older, much lower capacity, copper cables. The U.S. has a modified nuclear attack submarine that could tap into those undersea cables, and did so successfully several times. But these new fiber optic cables moved enormous amounts of data, with five gigabytes a second being a common throughput. To give you a sense of what that means, consider that some iPods have 60 gigabyte hard drives on them (using tiny, one inch hard drives). But a fiber optic cable can fill up that 60 gig drive in 12 seconds. It can fill 300 of those drives in an hour, 7200 in a day, and 216,000 in a month. Even the U.S. Navy’s newest and largest attack sub, the USS Jimmy Carter, which is specially equipped to tap into fiber optic cables, can’t hold enough hard drive or tape drives to hold more than a week or so worth of data. The problem is no longer one of grabbing the data, but of quickly finding what you need. The USS Jimmy Carter is receiving hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new equipment, including some very powerful computers. Like it’s smaller, Cold War predecessor, the USS Parche, the Carter has an underwater “joining room” for splicing, and tapping into, fiber optic cable. This is a very tricky task, considering the high voltage running through the cable, and the need to tap in without interrupting service, and alerting the cable operator.
Then again, some 90 percent of transoceanic fiber optic cables eventually cross American or British territory. So getting into the cable is not impossible, or very secret. What is kept very secret is any news about the software, and other technology, that would be used to scan the data stream coming through the fiber optic cable. But that raises another question. How long are you going to park the USS Carter over that tap in order to filter its throughput? All the more reason to believe most of the taps are being made on land, or close to land so another cable can be run to a land station containing computer equipment to handle the filtering. But the USS Carter would have its hands full tapping all the new undersea fiber optic cables out there that don’t cross friendly territory, or planting other sensors. Whatever the USS Carter ends up doing, it will be decades before the general public knows the details of what is inside that sub, and what exactly it does.
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| tapping into, fiber optic cable. This is a very tricky task, considering the high voltage running through the cable
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Yeah, set my meter off too.
Fiber has a loss every couple of miles that needs a boost. It's possible they use underwater repeater cases which require power.
I think they need electrical power for switching junctions too.
Single mode fiber can go 35 or 36 miles between repeaters.
http://yarchive.net/phone/oceanic_cable.html
I couldn't remember the exact numbers. But yea, that's where a transatlantic cable would need power.
bump for later read
Just FYI, FWIW... for a couple of years, the stretch of I-95 between Savannah and the King's Bay sub base has undergone a vast widening and upgrading, and one of the things that stood out was that they were laying large quantities of thick, multicolored underground cable of some sort. I have been told this is fibreoptic cable. To what purpose, I have no idea, but it's in place now.
Always learning something new here. Thanks...I'll be ready for the quiz ;>) maybe.
The fiber optic cables would not carry any voltage (other than occasional static) the repeaters would be powered but would then go through a electrical to optical interface (converter if you will) where once again the signal is purely optical. BS Indeed!
Could have been flex duct. Makes pulling in future stuff easier. Usually blue, orange, or some other color.
The power is carried within the cable. FITL has a hybrid design like this.
the power to the electrical devices is run along with the optic cable?
Just about EVERYTHING in this article is wrong:
1. You can splice into a submarine cable, but it is difficult to do and easy to detect.
2. There IS power in the cable (unless it is a very short-distance cable, and it used to power repeaters. In fact, the place to "splice in" is at these repeaters since there is no need to splice the fiber at all. Instead, you tap in to the repeater's electronics.
3. You would not "park" a submarine to gather intelligence for more than a very short time. You would run your own submarine cable to backhaul the tapped bitstream.
4. I think all of this crap about tapping submarine cables is a cover story. The way you do it in real life is you bribe someone to let you tap in at a landing point or a SONET switch on land. You backhaul on another lambda to a friendlier place.
Ditto. The whole point of fiber is that it isn't carrying any juice, just light.
Those were the colors. Must be new stuff- I'm familiar with conduit, raceways, trays, and armored cable.
The cable is most likely color coded to identify they type, number and arrangement of fibers running through it, if it is indeed cable. It could also be innerduct, which is used to house fiber in larger, existing ductwork or conduit.
As to the purpose, it could be just about anything related to communications - Telephone, cable TV, Internet, etc. If it's a datastream, fiber will carry it. I know that Verizon has been doing a lot of upgrades to their phone lines, extending fiber into neighborhoods and even preparing to carry cable TV, so you might have seen some of that going on.
Word! Human intelligence beats the high tech stuff any day. There is simply too much "noise" (useless data) in everyday communications to really sort through. It didn't take high tech to pull off 9/11 or the Madrid bombings.
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